Comment by jp57
Well, he rolled up to the same director and was the most senior engineer under that director, so it was a little bit his business.
And, like I said it was only semi scolded: he came to me and quietly said something like, "you guys don't seem very busy", which I took to mean "why are you loudly brainstorming future work when the guys in the next row of cubes over haven't slept in 36 hours?"
My answer was, "All our stuff is working."
I heard it expressed years ago, when the role was still call sysops, that it was the one job where the better you were then the less work you did.
It was attached to a similar anecdote about someone being yelled at for crafting a well-oiled system.