[strken]

It's a gigantic pain in the buttocks when you need someone to give you AWS credentials and you have to wait three days for them to be back in the office. Add in a few other people with multiple days off and you can spend an entire week waiting for a combined 10 minutes of labour to be done.

If there was some kind of common arrangement where employees could go to the beach or attend piano lessons or whatever, but check their phone once an hour and unblock everyone else, and always be in the office for the official meeting day, it would be a lot more palatable.

[tremon]

It's an equally gigantic pain in the buttocks to be the only someone who can give out AWS credentials. Why does that have to be one person? Why isn't that role spread out across a team?

What you're describing is an organizational failure, even if that person were working 168 hours a week.

[strken]

Sure, but organisations do fail. Saying "oh, that's just an organisational failure" doesn't stop it from happening. Putting people in an office together is designed to let them recover from failure faster. When a randomly selected group of people are absent at any given time, gridlock happens.

There are also better examples than "one employee with AWS credentials," and I feel we're bikeshedding on the specific bad example, rather than talking about the broader principle of coping with blockers when the team doesn't work the same hours.

[falcor84]

Well, I suppose we could compensate people for being on call for this sort of stuff separately from "heads down" work.