[q7xvh97o2pDhNrh]

Thanks! And, yeah, I agree -- it's basically a communication breakdown.

It takes work to continuously bring everyone together to disagree-and-commit over priorities. It's one of the major components of leadership and influence in organizations these days. Ideally, managers are continuously broadcasting information and regularly pulling each other into meetings to have healthy debates.

(An old mentor taught me that timelines are the lowest-common-denominator of communication. When people stop getting useful information and get frustrated, they resort to pushing on timelines, since that's the one common language everyone in the org can speak without needing any other strategic context.)

I think another major contributor is that so many people have never worked at a healthy, well-functioning technology organization. Then, as people bounce around, they bring their habits (and coping skills) with them. Endless hordes of certified scrum-masters team up with non-technical stakeholders to turn engineering teams into coding teams -- and the cycle continues on.