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>> Any blockers that do occur are dealt with at the time, leaving nothing unaddressed by the time the next day rolls around. You must not be working with micro

>> Any blockers that do occur are dealt with at the time, leaving nothing unaddressed by the time the next day rolls around. You must not be working with micro-services then. It can take a week just to get permission to call another team's API or a month to get an external vendor to respond to some critical question. Now obviously I am not sitting idle while blocked, but assuming that blocker will be removed by next morning seems quite unrealistic and rarely happens in my world.

nfhshy68 4y ago
I couldn't handle that. At $WORK we encourage teams to unblock themselves. If that means you need to work on someone else's codebase off you go. Territorial people don't last long here. I can't remember the last time I was really blocked by an other team. It's incredibly rare. They either help or get out of the way.
- monster_group 4y ago
  It's not about being territorial, it's about ownership. I assume you work for a small company. At Big Co. there are thousands of services and APIs. You can't give default permissions to everybody to call every API. That would be a giant security lapse. Other teams let you modify their code but only after they thoroughly understand what you need to modify and what is it that that you are tying to do. They own the code and run in production. So it makes sense for them to critically evaluate whether you should be allowed to do what you are trying to do. All of that takes time and hence multi-day blocker.
  - nfhshy68 4y ago
    Not that small, 2k devs. Generally we don't go walking through other teams code bases unless we have to and we usually consult with the team before doing stuff. They just don't let their roadmap block our roadmap. We don't use microservices. That helps a lot. We also have teams that manage infra. We do own the code we deploy but anyone can jump in and help if a fix is needed.
randomdata 4y ago
> It can take a week just to get permission to call another team's API or a month to get an external vendor to respond to some critical question. Sure, but you are still unlikely to realize that you're blocked by that exactly at the start of your day. Once your blockage has been communicated, likely in the middle of your day, the state will remain until you are unblocked. There is no value in repeating every day that you're still waiting on Outside Vendor. The blocking state has been addressed. It is known that nothing will change until the state has changed. And it is not like Outside Vendor can update you in an internal stand-up on why it is taking them so long, given that they won't be present, so you're not even getting that value out of bringing it up again.

nfhshy68 4y ago

I couldn't handle that. At $WORK we encourage teams to unblock themselves. If that means you need to work on someone else's codebase off you go. Territorial people don't last long here. I can't remember the last time I was really blocked by an other team. It's incredibly rare. They either help or get out of the way.

monster_group 4y ago
It's not about being territorial, it's about ownership. I assume you work for a small company. At Big Co. there are thousands of services and APIs. You can't give default permissions to everybody to call every API. That would be a giant security lapse. Other teams let you modify their code but only after they thoroughly understand what you need to modify and what is it that that you are tying to do. They own the code and run in production. So it makes sense for them to critically evaluate whether you should be allowed to do what you are trying to do. All of that takes time and hence multi-day blocker.
- nfhshy68 4y ago
  Not that small, 2k devs. Generally we don't go walking through other teams code bases unless we have to and we usually consult with the team before doing stuff. They just don't let their roadmap block our roadmap. We don't use microservices. That helps a lot. We also have teams that manage infra. We do own the code we deploy but anyone can jump in and help if a fix is needed.

randomdata 4y ago

> It can take a week just to get permission to call another team's API or a month to get an external vendor to respond to some critical question. Sure, but you are still unlikely to realize that you're blocked by that exactly at the start of your day. Once your blockage has been communicated, likely in the middle of your day, the state will remain until you are unblocked. There is no value in repeating every day that you're still waiting on Outside Vendor. The blocking state has been addressed. It is known that nothing will change until the state has changed. And it is not like Outside Vendor can update you in an internal stand-up on why it is taking them so long, given that they won't be present, so you're not even getting that value out of bringing it up again.