> You can't complain that people interrupt you with things when it's your job to decide whether or not they should have interrupted you

Yes I agree! And it is funny because ironically throughout my years (thankfully to a lesser extent recently) the most inaccessible people have been managers. They always seemed to have calendars stuffed to the brim with "important" meetings

"Engineering manager" can refer to different things to different people.

Some people think it means "a project/product manager (PM) for an Engineering team/org." PMs are all about meetings, because their job is to sit with the team, understand what they're doing, and then use that information to 1. glue the team together at the joints (i.e. act as an Enterprise Service Bus for the team's otherwise-flaky message-passing); 2. help the org understand where the team is with their work; and 3. balance the needs of the org with the needs of the team (mostly by pushing back against the org when people without the PM's understanding of the "inside view" of the team, request things that make no sense given that "inside view.")

Other people interpret the term "Engineering manager" as more akin to a tech lead — someone who does engineering, but whose responsibility is technically to marshal resources (other engineers on the team, usually more junior) to get things done. While these folks still do engineering, they only do it when things either "slip through the cracks" such that there are no people free to work on something (usually because the thing is urgent/unplanned, but everyone is busy with planned work); or when nobody on the team has the personal experience with the problem domain and also doesn't really need to have that experience (e.g. when an old legacy component is falling over and needs to be patched Right Now, despite a rewrite for that component being almost shipped.)

The problem comes when orgs try to conflate/confuse these two roles, and install one person (either with only one of the two skillsets, or with both) to serve both roles. Usually the person either becomes stretched far too thin; or just fails to do the half of the job they know less about.

I simply tell them, on the record, that I think my topic is more important than their X meeting and why I think that. If they disagree or don't respond, then it's on them.

I don't think the author is saying they shouldn't be interrupted, just that they're not going to change the focus of the _team_ without the criteria they laid out being true.

I think that's entirely reasonable, with a few exceptions (i.e., production is on fire and needs fixed now).

The point is that every barrier you put up ("Have you answered my 3 special questions!?") means people are less likely to interrupt you, which is great on the face of it, except for that one time you really want to hear about something as soon as possible and they decide not to bother you because they haven't written a spec for "Make sure the website is actually up."

Being interrupted a lot is less bad than creating a culture where people are afraid to bring bad things to you early.

I dont understand why it goes from "person comes in (implicitly) demanding work" to "person doesnt even talk to me at all" in that scenario. I think if you have had an empathetic "training session" previously such that they are aware of how you are going to evaluate requests, they will come with questions/conversation rather than requests/demands.

Also these questions (I assume) are not rigid "bring a signed stakeholder form to me before we start", its an informal "Mr. X wants this worked on instead of (other thing)?" and they say "Yes". If later it turns out to be inaccurate then the requestor is now the boy who cried wolf and gets vetted much more strictly for future requests. Possibly with a signed stakeholder form before you start.

It’s called Flipping the Bozo Bit and it can happen almost that fast.

I'm not sure that's true. I don't think there's any malice in their three questions, and they seem reasonable. Of course, they could be an asshole and demand way too much detail in those answers.

But the questions are really simple: What's the impact? Is the scope of work agreed asked for by product?

The third question is really their question to their team, what's the effort needed for us to fulfill this ask?

That seems like common sense to me, but maybe I'm missing something. These questions should be answered before even the original asker starts their work.

Right, the third one is non-negotiable. In no scenario would it be ok for a requestor to come in dictating how long it would take, and any language about that would always be reason for having a conversation to set that expectation.

I think thats true when a lateral team is asking for work, but he also lumps in requests from higher-up. The assumption would always be that this person knows the priorities better so is in better position to say if work is urgent. The disconnect with these parties is usually that they forgot you are in the middle of "other thing that is more urgent" or that there will be unwanted downstream impact, and so they can be convinced that actually the new thing is not as urgent.

That is a bad assumption. Superiors can make the call on urgency, but don't know the tradeoff involved. They will always ask for more and need to be presented the costs.

Superiors usually don't make any better calls on urgency, and the more superior the more completely out of touch they usually are, and the more they need a conversation like this.

I consider it a failure of the manager if their superiors don't have the tradeoff information for a decision they are making. It's an expectation that managers also manage up

It depends on the organization. In my org, the people most often interrupting us either have

1. Power of the purse. They fund our teams and ultimately determine priorities

2. Organizational mandate. Blanket authority to dictate standards and penalties for non-compliance (which may include unilaterally shutting your service down).

The best you can hope for in these cases is to surface the costs to those people and hope they are making rational decisions.

Isn’t this classic Type 1 vs Type 2 errors? Minimize the catastrophic error, which in this case is no interrupt and urgent thing, because tolerance for that happening needs to be as low as possible, so accept the other kind of error: non urgent, interrupt.

It's confusing because he wrote "you" which reads as "the manager" in the first sentence, when he clearly meant "the team", as shown in the following sentences.