And heaven-forbid any developer actually calls up a customer or subject-matter expert without routing absolutely everything through one or more layers of middlemen and bureaucracy.

"Just send me your questions and I'll pass them along..." Because no one has _ever_ had a question answered and had a follow-up question based on the answer before... /s

True story: Myself and a bunch of internal customers are literally less than 50 meters away in the same office. The blessed middleman is in a different timezone 8 hours ahead.

So instead of a quick conversation 30 minutes with helpful whiteboard doodles, I have to compose my questions and decision-tree into an e-mail and wait at least for a day or two for a reply that may or may not be useful.

I came in my company as a team lead to a very disfunctional department, the developers were frustrated because of unclear requirements and the business side was upset because they could never get their deliverables despite "very clear" 100 page documentation specs and a "detailed" list of requirements.

They would email each other even though they were in the same office more to document everything and CYA than for communications.

On the dev side, I banned internal email for discussions. I told them that they must talk to people first if they are in the office and then send emails of documents, screen shots or whatever.

I also took it on as personal mission to never say "no" to any request and always talk to the person who was making the request - in person - see if we could come up with an acceptable compromise and tell them how it would affect their deliverable.

Are there repercussions to just walking over and asking them then forwarding the middleman a summary / recap?

There was a "Hey, don't do that, X needs to be in the loop" complaint. (Didn't see it myself, but technical program manager who was also in on the meetings told me.)

Later that remote person left the company, and the position was left unfilled for a year and some projects got mothballed.