Fundamentally when you dig deep enough in this line of reasoning it’s calling out hubris. It’s recognising that developers can be pretty adept at blaming everything else but their own actions.
Ever worked in a “spinning plates” kinda team? The kinda team who can tell you “Our release process takes 3 hours, but it’s not our fault, we’ve learned to be helpless because we feed into a dept level build and is for a good reason and and and …”. Faced with this the spinning plates mentality uses the downtime gifted by the broken process to go start up some more work in progress. Gotta keep everyone busy after all! What are you gonna do on morning stand up if you can’t rhyme off 3 or 4 inconsequential updates that none of your colleagues are paying attention to because the truth is what you worked on wasn’t important to them, just as most of their tasks weren’t important to you. Maybe there’s one dev carrying the whole team but everyone already knows what that person’s working on so stand up becomes something just like listening to the news - it can be entertaining but it doesn’t mean anything to the rest of your morning. If an asteroid decided to crash down and block the I-123 to work this morning you’d already know before you turned on the TV and so it is for standup in this kind of team.
Contrast with a team working on one thing together - they’re not accepting a 3 hour release process. They’re certainly not picking up another task just because they’re blocked. They’re swarming on resolving that messed up release process that they don’t control. You can bet that what they see as their top priority, the release process, is not management or any other responsible team’s top priority. This is really where the two approaches differ, the coherent team are now focused on figuring out how to move forward. Not picking up more work to stuff into a release pipeline that’s unduly restricted a little further downstream towards prod.
Ever worked in a “spinning plates” kinda team? The kinda team who can tell you “Our release process takes 3 hours, but it’s not our fault, we’ve learned to be helpless because we feed into a dept level build and is for a good reason and and and …”. Faced with this the spinning plates mentality uses the downtime gifted by the broken process to go start up some more work in progress. Gotta keep everyone busy after all! What are you gonna do on morning stand up if you can’t rhyme off 3 or 4 inconsequential updates that none of your colleagues are paying attention to because the truth is what you worked on wasn’t important to them, just as most of their tasks weren’t important to you. Maybe there’s one dev carrying the whole team but everyone already knows what that person’s working on so stand up becomes something just like listening to the news - it can be entertaining but it doesn’t mean anything to the rest of your morning. If an asteroid decided to crash down and block the I-123 to work this morning you’d already know before you turned on the TV and so it is for standup in this kind of team.
Contrast with a team working on one thing together - they’re not accepting a 3 hour release process. They’re certainly not picking up another task just because they’re blocked. They’re swarming on resolving that messed up release process that they don’t control. You can bet that what they see as their top priority, the release process, is not management or any other responsible team’s top priority. This is really where the two approaches differ, the coherent team are now focused on figuring out how to move forward. Not picking up more work to stuff into a release pipeline that’s unduly restricted a little further downstream towards prod.