> My defense strategy has become to keep adding friction to the request process (keep asking for more specifications before I can start work) if the requests ar

> My defense strategy has become to keep adding friction to the request process (keep asking for more specifications before I can start work) if the requests aren’t coming from my team/manager. Sometimes people go away, sometimes they pivot to other projects and ask if I can do that instead It's possible that I've been lucky or had an otherwise uncommon experience, but based on the advice of one of my earliest managers, I've pretty much considered it a rule that if someone other than my direct manager asks me to do something, I redirect them to my manager, who will determine the scope and if they think it's something I should be spending time on based on that and then come to me if so. This is non-programming work as well; at one job, I was quite frequently requested by the other managers in my department to serve on interview panels, which can be quite time consuming, so not committing to them without my manager's buy-in helped ensure we were on the same page about how I should be spending my time.