[timssopomo]

I totally agree with everything you said about information asymmetry and responsibility to provide context. Maybe I didn't explain clearly: it's not an operational failing if someone just decides to "take initiative" to solve an irrelevant problem without telling their boss. It's not the managers job to monitor everything their employees do. It is their job to state goals, assign work, and monitor progress.

[brandall10]

One off things here or in the name of taking initiative... drawing down tech debt, POC's to prove a point, internal tools to help grease team productivity, sure. Stuff that a dev might do on their own time that they ensure doesn't get in the way of their assigned work.

But large chunks of work that form the corpus of a performance review? No. I've been doing this 26 years now and the only time I've seen that kind of maverick behavior on a team is when a manager is overwhelmed/distant/checked out or simply afraid of a particular employee because they're a chaos agent with a bit too much power, and IME, pretty dang rare.