Should developers be allowed to do anything except work on tickets?

I've worked in places which required every hour worked to be accounted for. This was slightly annoying, but also surprisingly informative sometimes. We usually ended up on accounting the time by the project basis, but I can imagine doing this on the ticket basis, especially if tickets are on the bigger side.

Of course with full time accounting, you want to either have some of "overhead" ones ("self-improvement", "lunch", "mandatory training", "all-hands meeting", "writing down all the tickets"), or you silently inflate logged time of real tasks to account for the overhead.

(I can also imagine some sort of dystopian organization where clueless product managers push the feature tickets, and management requires everyone to only work on the tickets. This sounds pretty nasty, but I don't think it will last for long - either the system will collapse from lack of maintenance, or people will start to pad the tickets. "Yes, it was absolutely necessary to upgrade node.js to the latest version in order to change background color of the login button. There was no other way")

Is this suggesting that all tickets should be fully scoped and planned by Product? If so, no. Devs also need to contribute to planning and should be able to write their own tickets when it’s needed. They have context that is necessary in order for planning to be done properly.

Why is this so hilarious? Perhaps as just evidence of the level of wage-slavery mindset that pervades the world today...

That would be fairly dystopian. Tickets should direct the devs, not micro-manage them.

Can you elaborate? This sounds like the ragebait title of a YouTube video.

Tell me you’ve only worked in large orgs without telling me you’ve only worked in large orgs.

This idea is preposterous for any small organization.

Albeit tickets are useful for a variety of reasons; when it comes to crunch time, you generally can’t be bothered. Also auditors do a bad job of verifying and validating if your tickets correspond to changes so the ISO excuse only holds so much weight.