I have been working for my current company for 7 months now and I am completing my two years in the industry in total. My company is a large enterprise, with relatively relaxed deadlines and flexible schedules.
We are a newly established team, most of us are juniors with experience ranging from new graduates, to two years experience at max. The only senior coworker, who is also the scrum master, won't bother to guide anyone and only minds his own business. Our manager is also an extremely hands off person.
Often when given work to produce, the new graduate coworkers retreat to their small "buddy teams", hoarding tasks, and work in a rush without planning, designing, consulting, or discussing anything with others. As a result, this dominates our development efforts due to their fast pace.
At this point, they produced very buggy code with no recognizable structure. The product is not scaling with even small loads. We now have a very mind-boggling local development setup, two different testing setups that are not working as intended, and they still keep telling us "we will fix it later".
At one point I tried to refactor one portion of the code since it was taking too long to build, and the manager was complaining about it. Even though coworkers knew about what I was doing, no one complained or opposed me at the beginning yet I came to hear that scrum master, who is the most senior coworker in our team, was mocking my attempts behind me to fix things as "waste of time", that "no one cared".
So I decided give up on refactoring altogether, it was not welcomed. At this time I managed to grab two new features to develop and completed them.
During our meetings with the manager, I expressed my concerns regarding all of this openly since day one. The manager often agrees with me, yet never offers a practical solution. He believes, with time it all will be alright.
He asked me why I was not providing the "fixes" or "improvements" to the problems I detect. He also asked me about the refactoring I was to do, since he was not approving the state the code was in, and I told him I was not able to follow through since I was all alone in doing that, that no one seems to care about quality besides me. I also mentioned the reaction I get from scrum master, that other colleague went for fixes and never informed me about it, so I focused on other duties.
So at this point, I feel like the manager thinks it is my responsibility to fix things since I am the one pointing out that problem. However, I find this approach unfair. I must say I don't think I am responsible for other's mistakes since they are not willing to learn from my "refactoring" and think it is "waste of time".
As you might realize, I am also fairly new in the workforce and have tons of soft and hard skills to learn. So here is my main dilemma:
What would happen if I avoid work related to this product and solely focus on other tasks from now on? Am I really responsible for this kind of work that is produced by coworkers via excluding me?
Edit: I should have made it clear that we are doing agile, scrum and kanban. As a result, there is no assignment of tasks, we volunteer for open tasks. Also, we all have the same manager whom I mentioned about in the post and have a horizontal hierarchy in our team, so there is no "boss", "team lead" or anything. We are expected to act collectively.
Edit 2: Shortened the post. Edit 3: Shortened the post further.
tl;dr: Coworkers are cowboy coding the product, not letting others contribute, the manager seems to expect me to provide the fix even though no one in the team seems to care besides me. Am I really responsible for fixing the work that I have barely contributed to since we are working as a team ?