It depends. In the situation where an Ops team has become stuck in firefighting mode, that's something which is often painfully obvious to the rest of the org. And, in that case, it's possible to make a good case for deliberately reorienting towards strategic rather tactical work.

Blocking out, say, 2x2 hours each day for "problem management" (fixing root causes of recurrent issues) becomes easy in that situation, with no subterfuge needed. Alternatively, you can nominate part of the team to be either on-call or entirely dedicated to incidents, shielding everyone else who can be dedicated to strategic work full-time (obviously, you need to do regular rotations).

The team themselves often need help in adjusting to that (firefighting can make you feel like a hero so, although stressful, it can be addictive). Blocking out specific timeslots can be helpful from this point of view, too - incidents often seem a lot more manageable if they're not crashing in on top of you at unpredictable intervals.

My favorite example of the heroic engineers are "helicopter" engineers who fly in, "solve" the problem at the expense of something else being made much worse. Usually getting the accolades of upper management.

Then the heroic engineers get promoted and then learn that they can use their weight to shove others around. Meanwhile the ICs that had to do fire drills to make crap happen don't typically get anything out of it, other than watching some manager that shoved them around get promoted.

I often call them by their title, "Staff Engineer" ;)

Holistic problem management < Make this problem disappear today

:/

But then why do a rather passive-aggressive calendar booking instead of first pinging folks on chat and asking "hey we really need your help asap but there is no gap in the calendar, could we work sth out"? No matter seniority.

To me this seems like a matter of company culture that is set from the top. If CTO and VP level act like that, it trickles down and that tone becomes the norm. In either way.

How does it depend? It’s remarkably easy to send someone a message and ask rather than just scheduling a meeting over top. It’s a basic social skill and basic courtesy.

Or you simply auto-decline conflicting invites

When someone books over their meeting i don’t understand why people don’t just decline the meeting with a note saying “this clashes with a meeting already in my diary”. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this and puts the onus back on the person to find a bigger time

I don’t even bother adding the note. People booked over it, they know it clashes with another meeting. No need to tell them the obvious.

I just press decline. If they ask, I say because you must have made a mistake. I was clearly not available at that time slot.

How do you expect a hierarchy to function? Should the assistant to the SVP ask the managers to let the employees reschedule? That’s like a lot of bureaucracy for exactly the same flexibility.

(Am open to better approaches though! Not saying I particularly enjoy last minute urgent meetings you can’t say no to. But most often those are important and with people whose agendas need more care than mine.)

shadow power dynamics is the answer. Someone with a title of "Regional VP of Sales" thinks they have a lot of power and influence and will exert that to get whatever they want. An IC engineer or product manager understandably wants to avoid the inevitable conflict and potential escalation should they refuse to attend. I agree they should just decline. I also understand the reality is more complicated because they know a decline isn't actually the end and the anxiety about what would follow can itself feel exhausting when it happens so often. So they choose to pick their battles/take the short-term path of least resistance.