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I couldn't handle that. At $WORK we encourage teams to unblock themselves. If that means you need to work on someone else's codebase off you go.

Territorial people don't last long here.

I can't remember the last time I was really blocked by an other team. It's incredibly rare. They either help or get out of the way.

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It's not about being territorial, it's about ownership. I assume you work for a small company. At Big Co. there are thousands of services and APIs. You can't give default permissions to everybody to call every API. That would be a giant security lapse. Other teams let you modify their code but only after they thoroughly understand what you need to modify and what is it that that you are tying to do. They own the code and run in production. So it makes sense for them to critically evaluate whether you should be allowed to do what you are trying to do. All of that takes time and hence multi-day blocker.

Not that small, 2k devs.

Generally we don't go walking through other teams code bases unless we have to and we usually consult with the team before doing stuff. They just don't let their roadmap block our roadmap.

We don't use microservices. That helps a lot. We also have teams that manage infra. We do own the code we deploy but anyone can jump in and help if a fix is needed.

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