Comment by 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.