Is it normal for a senior to have to spend so much time wrangling other teams for availability and approvals?

Posted by Meeesh-@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 36 comments

I feel like I’m going crazy. I used to set up meetings and then have people accept/decline or just ping if they can’t attend. Otherwise people would just show up. I would also only need to schedule meetings if email or ping can’t easily resolve it.

Now I’m working with different orgs and I’m wasting so much time on approvals and discussions. I had a design review scheduled today, no one showed up except my team and no one on the other team responded to the request. I’ll be bugging people for an accept/decline from now on, but this feels like such a waste of my time pinging 5+ people trying to get a response.

I’ve also needed to get a few approvals and requests for basic information. I started with creating a ticket, then after SLA passed, slack message, then email, then escalation. This happened like 8 times in the last month. The last time it happened I ended up needing to schedule a meeting where they joined and said yes within 30 seconds of me just repeating what was in all the previous communications.

I get that people are busy and I have a TPM and my manager to help manage everything, but it feels more like trying to cold email people asking for referrals. I know I’m complaining a lot and I know building out your network is important, but I also really hate it.

Is this a normal part of the job as a lead engineer and does it get worse beyond senior? Or is there any chance to continue to progress without this feeling like a massive part of the job?

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No-Economics-8239@reddit

The further up the ladder you climb, the more your job includes coordinating with others. I don't know if chaos is the norm, but my last few stints at Fortune 500 companies have included a fair share.

The bigger the company, the more silos form that try to direct who is responsible for what and ideally creates domain space experts. In practice it tends to create strict limits around how and what people work on. Some people can or are willing to just receive a request via a conversation, IM, or email and help out. But that requires a degree of flexibility that seems to be increasingly rare.

The more work and stress you pile on someone, the less flexibility there is to just help others. Soft skills can help to some degree, and you can play the game of forging relationships and political capital and learning what people want and how they work and how best to approach them or convince them. But quid pro quo only gets you so far when people are already overtaxed, overworked, or checked out.

At the senior level, it's not directly your job to fix corporate disfunction. But you should be calling attention to it, at least to cover your own ass. But end of the day, your job is to solve problems. Identifying and removing blockers can be part of that too.

That you are coming here to complain rather than working with your manager speaks to the degree of disfunction. But they have some responsibility to making sure you have the resources you need to do the job. That includes the contacts and methods of communication necessary to get the people and approval and information required.

My traditional method is just to loop in the required managers or directors who are responsible for the people and projects I need to do my job when their direct reports aren't doing what is ostensibly their job. And I show up with receipts on what methods I've attempted and what results they have produced. And when I'm told the people I need are unavailable due to higher priority work, I rinse and repeat with my own leadership until I either get what I need or find a better job.

Goodie__@reddit

As a general rule the amount of time you have hands on code goes down as your seniority goes up.

The real question is: What are you spending your time doing? Are you enabling other members of your team to do work? To make sure they are doing the right work? Or are you doing busy work with people who CBF to be there?

Your problem sounds like the later, the former is just part of the job.

Breadinator@reddit

My favorite approach to approvals is:

Set a deadline for approval
Notify all parties of need to approve/review/feedback before deadline
Notify all parties that lack of commentary/review/discussion will be interpreted as implicit approval
Set a review meeting
One week before deadline, anyone who hasn't reviewed/approved/whatever is notified of the pending date and implied approval
On deadline, whoever is left that has not responded/commented/approved is given an entry of "Tacit Approval"
Move on

Lots of communication is best. May piss people off. But has a good chance of getting the attention you want.

comatosesperrow@reddit

Exactly this, don't let yourself get bogged down by the sloths.

Unless you genuinely need input or are blocked on next steps, I've always operated with a "silence is acceptance" motto. Especially if you've tried several times. Do what you think is best and move on.

Clean-Service2997@reddit

Sadly, it probs doesn’t get easier past senior—you just get used to it or get better at nudging. Hang in there, at least you’re not alone in this chaos!

haskell_rules@reddit

Common and normal? Yes. Acceptable? No.

1_21-gigawatts@reddit

“If dysfunction occurs often enough it becomes acceptable and normal.” -Drucker … or Torvalds. (Or someone else famous, I’m generally not pithy enough to have come up with this on my own.)

vilkazz@reddit

welcome to the industry where actual engineering inevitably decreases with your seniority.

All leaders are, in the end, human system engineers

unlucky_bit_flip@reddit

I was told playing Rimworld helps you study for the human system design interview

Any competitive game works tbh.

5v5 pvp games are like dealing with 4 batshit crazy weirdos who hold your results on their hands

Games with raiding is director lvl practice where you need to convince 20-40 ppl to k not fuck shit up for 5 mins.. and knowing that at least 3 ppl will definitely still find a way to stand in the fkn fire!

azuredrg@reddit

Wow, no wonder I was well prepared for 2-5am shitshow parties

Potato-Engineer@reddit

Yeah, but it's really hard to get the cannibal forks without getting arrested in this reality.

ImportantTree7632@reddit

Yeah this is pretty much the job at that level. The 30-second meeting thing is so real — I've had the exact same experience where a ticket + 3 slacks + an email gets resolved the moment u get someone on a call. Annoying but it works.

bulbishNYC@reddit

We used to work like a happy big family, everyone helps one another on short notice. Then came scrum, story points, metrics, separate teams. Now each team while more productive on paper, but they don’t pull in same direction together. Can’t get people to help me without misaligning their points, requires heads up to manager weeks ahead, then manager prioritizes with other managers..

Trawling_@reddit

It’s best to identify the right point of contact and try and get some sort of response from them first. They should be telling you the people to invite and they should be making sure they can/do join.

Part of it is clearly communicating what you need from the other team to the right person. Often, including the urgency (what is driving your request) will help a lot.

This doesn’t always work the first try. Sometimes you’re asking too high up, and should add in a “if I’m talking to the wrong person, would really appreciate if you’re able to point me in the right direction”. And then reaching out to said person (assuming they do respond) and saying “so and so told me you’re the right person for xyz. Can you help? Or point me to who would be the right person?”.

After you do this for a bit - you get to know who the right people are, how to ask them for the help/input you need, and provide them the context that gets them to respond or take action. But yea, that’s networking internally at work between different orgs/functions.

Bonus - if you get put in a circle/get ignored by all the people someone higher up directed you towards, you can go back and say “hey, I reached out to so and so and nada. Can you help?/is that the right person?”. Sometimes that works. Other times you need to realize your ask/request is not that important. And you take back all of the feedback to your own leadership. And they can get you unblocked, or they eat the shit that you’ve been dealing with too.

Then it’s less your problem. And it is what it is.

sylviama827@reddit

Sounds like your company doesn’t use slack? I can image with email and waiting for replying could be painful. I never cold schedule a ad-hoc meeting, always slack the main players before scheduling. For architecture review meetings too, although it’s repeated meetings, always slack to the people you want opinions on, make sure if they plan to attend that meeting, if not, ask for comments hopefully beforehand. Sometimes schedule a pre-meeting before the official review meeting with the main approvers to avoid surprises questions and big re-write. For difficult inter-team cooperation, ask your manager and product owner to involve if needed. But yes, with AI, we will all code less, and communication skill will even be more important. Also, if your co-workers show signs of ignorance, quite possible it means either they don’t care or they plan to change jobs. For remote workers, the less they turn on cameras, the more possibilities that they don’t care.

jcl274@reddit

yep. this has always been the bottleneck

fued@reddit

yeah, its why I reach a certain level and refuse to go any higher.

It all becomes about scheduling and billability/productivity management, not about actually solving issues.

CorrectPeanut5@reddit

Most orgs have some level of disfunction. If they are saying yes after corning them for 15 minutes the review is likely minimal at best. Try to get the approver list expanded.

I'd also say my observation is it's gotten worse since dev work has shifted to remote. I do miss the days where I could just call over the wall to a peer for a review.

Ein_Bear@reddit

AWS?

throwaway_0x90@reddit

In the future we're headed for, these "soft skills" are indeed going to be more important. So is it normal? No, ...but it is the "new normal".

Wide-Pop6050@reddit

If something is going this wrong, something needs to be reorganized. What does your manager say about this whole workflow? Sure this happens, but its not efficient and not right and doesn't have to.

johnpeters42@reddit

Personally I would write "Failure to attend this meeting constitutes acceptance", but then I would probably just avoid projects with that much red tape in the first place.

mongopark98@reddit

What would you then do if they didn’t attend. Nothing, except you’re the manager. Escalating to your manager and theirs is one way to go.

forbiddenknowledg3@reddit

Let's see AI improve this LOL

CompassionateSkeptic@reddit

Little hard to answer in terms of normalcy, but the way I think about it is that our expertise often, perhaps inevitably, becomes about solving problems in broader expressions over time. That does include organizational knowledge, cross functional knowledge, and hurdling the hurdles instead of tripping over them.

It depends on the place and how interdepartmental friction manifests, but there’s nothing in the role, title, or capacity as IC that prevents that stuff from getting included. And I wouldn’t expect consolidating to TPMs or engineering managers would do anything but make that institutional knowledge brittle while also creating bottlenecks. The benefit is clear, but that would be the cost to carefully understand this as a trade off.

Meeesh-@reddit (OP)

Yeah, I’ve always accepted that part of the job will be like this. I’ve spent a lot of time working with leadership to fix organizational issues to help everyone work more efficiently.

I think the challenge is that the difficult org is what I would consider outside of my area of responsibility when it comes to organizational efficiency. Unlike other orgs I’ve worked with in the past, this one feels like they require escalation for any response to happen.

Things get done, but just so so slowly.

Yeah, I hear that. I have dealt with a few of those. It’s speculative but it could mean that the org accidentally brought the brand damage hammer down on themselves by lacking process that could have prevented something (or something similar). The escalations are a way to consolidate accountability to a higher level of the org while also slowing down, increasing auditability, and allowing an I sufficiently controlled process to move forward even though it’s meaningfully broken. I think of this as a control that failed open by necessity, even though that’s a bad thing.

MangoTamer@reddit

I'm curious if it is currently near the review times when people are trying to make everyone else look bad by slowing down their competition by having slow responses.

lawrencek1992@reddit

Your organization has some process/scheduling issues it seems, like the ghosting and not responding to calendar invites are an organizational issue. But yeah tracking down all the decisions and requirements becomes part of the job as a senior or team lead. Some of it can be offloaded to a project manager, but not all of it.