We could go on and on. But I'm too tired and ... burnt out to continue.
It gives time to just polish off those little rough edges that build up over time and gives developers a lull in which to work on low stress 9-4.30 kind of work.
Except that day is not counted in sprint planning so we don't have points allocated to it, we have meetings during that day and are also expected to perform our normal duty such as helping customers onboard, and 95% of our tech debt tasks would take more than a day to fix anyway.
The result is that we have 10% of our time supposedly assigned to tech debt, but in 11 months in that team I have only worked on tech debt once during those days.
I think these kinds of arrangements are dangled as a carrot in front of engineers, while the person doing the dangling knows full well that they are selling a lie. Now, such an offer is a red flag in my eyes, unless I hear a credible story firsthand from every engineer that interviews me.
Next time I am offered such a carrot, I basically will need to see it put into writing before I believe a word of it. I suspect you have learned a similar lesson from your own experience.
I hate the view that allocating a fixed percentage of time every X week(s) instead of allocating proper time as a project to fix issues affecting the productivity of the whole team/engineering org is doing something. It's just another source of frustration.
https://nealdtaylor.com/burnout-trumps-agility/ https://nealdtaylor.com/agile-burn-out/
Sadly, with higher interest rates, there is a pressure to produce results in the short-term, at the expense of long-term investments.
I've been working in this industry for 18 years, in different countries with different central banks rates and macroeconomics conditions, it's always been the exact same.
The idea of a forced break to do these things implies they arent important. Otherwise they should already get picked up.
I see firebreak sprints as a symptom of an org not valuing engineer feedback. "Let the grunts blow off some steam or they'll get disgruntled and leave."
I certainly hadn't ever got that impression. None of my friends and acquaintances in other professions ever have that either.
Until you have a boss demanding to do cleanup or whatever during low-demand times because they're too beancouter-ish to hire staff dedicated to keep up appearance.
in most programming jobs, even though you are doing CRUD, your brain should direct you into specific direction (open file.js, put after if (x > 0) block and so on), which tires your brain.