I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago about unprompted curiosity - the idea that the engineers who dig into things without being asked are the ones who end up driving direction. A friend responded with something that stuck with me, and I think the original post had a blind spot worth addressing.
This week I was looking at a Kubernetes deployment and noticed one of the containers was 1.7GB. Nobody asked me to look at container sizes. It wasn't on a sprint board. But 1.7GB is wrong, and I wanted to know why.
I recently gave a presentation at school over NASA's budget, and I stressed the importance of having that budget increased. My arguments were solid, but my audience wasn't interested.