In my (albeit limited) experience, there's slack in the workweek, and that slack can provide the required time to do random stuff.
I recognize this isn't true in organizations where everything is micromanaged, work time is tracked in hours or even minutes, and autonomy doesn't exist.
The more the employees are treated like responsible professionals, the more this is possible. And conversely, the more they're like factory workers behind a conveyor belt, the less this is possible.
It's also not true in organizations where headcount has been pared back to the very bones, so that everything is crunch time, all the time.
It is still rare for a company to explicitly decide to devalue quality and mid/long term costs, and typically it is a side effect of incentives.
Obviously 'fake Agile' is an industry wide problem here. But if teams cannot control their capacity expectations, it will always devolve to this
'slack' was a poor term to use IMHO, but it is here.
In companies that care about med/long term survival and success can fix this over time.
Selling it as derisking on strategic and initiative time scales is one way that can help.
> In my (albeit limited) experience, there's slack in the workweek, and that slack can provide the required time to do random stuff.
How do you incentivise developers to put that slack to good use? In my experience, without an incentive, culture slowly rots to the point where the majority of developers simply don't.
There is only slack for places that allow it. All too many companies overpack their sprints with as much as possible.