Healthy orgs must have slack in the system and allow teams and individuals to do a little chasing of fun or meaningful things that give them intrinsic pride and motivation.

Teams must advocate for projects, but, for individuals, one solution that I've seen help is that the week long oncall developer handles sprint interruptions, slack questions, and bugs. No sprint commitments. If something is not on fire, they get to work on whatever they think will add value at their discretion. New tooling, proof of concepts, pet-peeve bugs that can't get prioritized, etc.

After lots of stabilization work, devs looked forward to oncall.

I feel this. The zero-sum pendulum of time is a bitch.

I wonder, are you under 35? This story reminds me of my experience. When I was younger, all the problems could be solved - all at once. I'd throw time at just about everything - cleaner code, fewer bugs, features delivered.

Later, the scope of what I was working on grew. No amount of time could be thrown at all the problems - it was zero sum. I had mentors try to guide me, to focus on solving what you need to, to focus on areas of impact and let the other things slide. If you don't, then the areas of impact never get done.

On the other side of the coin, the really frustrating part - is the bullshit processes you speak of. Time is zero sum. Yet, here was the team wasting time on another status meeting and time estimation; not getting the things done. Small quick wins, which do have impact, are not small quick wins because - did you fill out the TPS report regarding user impact? Did that get approval and story pointing? Is it a strategic initiative? No, then why are you working on it? Those are unhealthy orgs. Places like that I think are filled with folks that can't do the job and ride the coat tails of those that get shit done. These are also places where people want to go, clock in, and just not think that hard about their job - just do it and get home to their families.

Though, I've come to also appreciate that mentality too. I've never been a true owner at any place I've worked at. I've cared, I've been tricked into caring - but the long hours only went to enriching the person that had 1M shares, while I had just 2000. They were an owner, I was pawn.

I've worked in mid-sized companies where my job wasn't just one thing, and where I was not owned by a project manager. Other concerns existed. Even back at the ancient bank I worked at, our implementation of ITIL recognised this, and put incident and problem managers on equal footing with project managers. If a frequent issue is caused by some underlying problem, that problem needs to be fixed. Working on it was absolutely legitimate. During sprint planning a team could take work from the new features like or the bugs pile without interference from a project manager. If they complained that you worked on a bug, you could lean on the problem manager to talk to the project manager. If the project manager's timelines drift, part of their job is to deal with that, inform stakeholders and extend the deadlines. If they continually fail to factor in the possibility of conflicting work then they suck at their job. If their boss gives them shit for a slipping deadline that was out of their control, then they also suck. In your example the company allocate 100% of your time to working on new features and none of it to maintaining the product or keeping customers happy. There's no point in putting a brand new engine into a rusty car with bald tyres. This a bad organisation.