> Like the radio cookie tin the Germans were searching for, the problem is painfully obvious and immediately visible: we’re overextending ourselves with work.

> Like the radio cookie tin the Germans were searching for, the problem is painfully obvious and immediately visible: we’re overextending ourselves with work. At my organization, I think the reason is organizational structure and focus time. When I look at all the WIP tickets I have open, most of them would be easy to close, if only I could get unblocked on them. Structurally, if you have a lot of managers with control over their little fiefdoms, and you need to get sign off from all of them to do something, that can take weeks: I have a couple tickets right now that can't be closed until I either find time for a meeting with 7 busy people, or schedule 7 individual meetings. In the middle of summer, with vacations and all, that's not easy. Engineers at our organization, which is remote first, have done a great job of protecting their focus time. But one negative consequence of this is that they can't be interrupted even when they should be. If I need to ask the Lord of the Backend Engineers a question, I know he's not going to respond to me until the last half hour of his day, when he does all the stuff he considers beneath him, including communicating with other people. And it's probably going to be a terse, one-sentence response that requires another followup the next day. I really don't think there's too much work for any reasonable company, I think the lack of throughput is due to communication issues, or in a larger sense a cultural issue related to how we expect to interact with each other. I'm not ready to say this is a remote work problem, because my last organization was 100% remote, and didn't have this issue at all.