Yes, and the worst part is I don't think it's even a side effect of organizational structure because I've seen it in so many places. There is just a quirk of human psychology where "if you touch a problem it belongs to you now," and the result is a situation where everyone would be genuinely happy and eager to help but nobody (except the newbie) dares try because the consequences for trying are immediate and dire.
This seems related to what I think of as the “jurisdictional hack.” Nobody can solve every problem, so you define a realm that’s your responsibility and anything outside it is someone else’s problem.
Keeping your jurisdiction small means you can do more within that jurisdiction, by ignoring even important problems that are outside it.
But the alternative is ineffective doomscrolling because all the world’s problems are yours.
By definition Google's board, and shareholders who elected them, can 'solve every problem' within Google, since they have the authority to wind down the company.
It's just that practically nobody in the world can credibly demand Google's board, or even just upper middle management, to make a decision on small matters.
Sure, but that's because they can delegate to lower management tiers.
When a ticket reaches your average IT guy, they can't usually delegate it to a lower tier employee unless there are formal support tiers, like L1 and L2, and the ticket was sent to one of the upper layer techs (which usually doesn't happen straight away, because of how L1 and L2 support teams work).
If this is not the case, the only way out is forwarding the issue to another team.
There’s a lot you can criticize Google about, but that would have extremely disruptive worldwide effects. Google is load-bearing infrastructure. Dismantling it would require solving whole lot of new problems.
This is how we have a really urgent problem, which I can fix in the non-production environments in an afternoon, only to have people emailing me for the next month asking why this extremely important problem is not fixed in prod yet.
Sorry guys, that’s another team. They’re extremely reluctant to deploy even very important things. Separation of responsibilities means we have no other choice.
