I was the go-to guy for this under my former boss, but he let me do pretty much whatever I wanted, so it usually wasn’t an issue to not work on anything else while playing around with new stuff.
Though there was a time when he wanted me to onboard my simple little internal website to a big complicated CICD system, just so we could see how it worked and if it would be useful for other stuff. It wouldn’t have been useful for anything else, and I already had a script that would deploy updates to my site that was simple, fast, and reliable. I simply ignored every request to look into that.
Other times I could tell him his idea wouldn’t work, and he would say “ok” and walk away. That was that. This accounted for about 30% of what he came to me with.
