[wkrsz]

> Resist the urge to build walls between people/teams/departments

Do you often have to deal with support staff reaching out directly to developers on Slack to investigate some problem – without going through "normal" process of creating a ticket that gets assigned? Or even asking for features.

Developers generally want to be helpful, but also small requests often turn out to be rabbit holes. And even in best case it distracts from work that was explicitly assigned and scheduled.

I noticed I experience a bit of anxiety every time I'm doing some work that came through backchannels. The way I try to alleviate is create the ticket myself, mention its source and assign it to myself. This way switching context is visible and I can tell myself that "if manager doesn't want me to spend time debugging this now, they can react".

[9rx]

In fairness, it seems the problem in your case is that the "manager" has built up walls between people, trying to own the work, and in that not allowing you the full context that would allow you to make informed decisions around such asks. "The manager not wanting you to spend time debugging this now" should be a false premise. Knock down the walls and you will know yourself that you shouldn't spend time debugging it now.

[wkrsz]

That makes sense. Either knock down the walls all the way and empower developers to make decisions, or keep the walls and let all requests go through the pipeline.