A youtube video won't work for me -- my work computer goes idle if the mouse or keyboard doesn't send input for more than 10 minutes. A lot of my work involves work off of my computer, so I just bought a USB mouse jiggler to keep my computer awake so I still get instant messages from my coworkers when I'm working offline.

That sounds... unnecessary. There is always stuff to refactor, and tests to add, folks showing up at the last minute with new requirements. Or you can just wait a day to push commits, etc. More honest, I think.

Also called “The Queen’s duck”.

https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/

I’d be careful with this. You dont want to build a reputation of building buggy software and have sloppy work.

I can't think of any environment that I've been in where this is true. I think the closest I've been was as part of a team of three people where each of us could really handle any task in the codebase. It was also true that there were things that we each cared far more about as individuals, so, in spite of comparable skills, we tended to gravitate to specific stories, anyway.

As a manager, I have every expectation that we won't be doing scrum exactly by the book, but that's totally fine. I'm more concerned about (reasonably) consistently reproducible levels of productivity, not squeezing every point out of a sprint. If there's slack time, great. That seems to be when people are most likely to contribute new stories, learn something new, etc. Besides, rigidly following scrum feels anti-Agile, anyway. People and interactions over tools and processes.

Picking up another task doesn’t mean that it has to be finished. If one lacks skill, they can train. If documentation is missing, one can document whatever they learn. The last one is difficult to address, but not impossible. If team members don’t give a shit about the product, I bet they can still find something they give a shit about that also contributes to the product.

I am definitely willing to concede I may be in a bad situation but are there really teams in Agile frameworks with fibonacci pointing where you can pick up a 3-5 point ticket, finish it before the end of a sprint and not work on anything else?