> I've learned a coping strategy: just forget the project scope and focus on your little plot of land.
I get what your are saying and you are getting a lot of positive reinforcement about this. I would suggest to you a caveat.
I've worked in some orgs where this mentality becomes entrenched. In these new-fangled tech startups with people changing roles and even companies every two years this probably happens less. But I've seen people entrenched into their own kingdoms for decades. An individual, or small team, creates a moat around their "little plot of land" and they become intransigent. This leads to two bad outcomes: they resist any change to their systems or process, going so far as to obfuscate it to protect it. They also don't pay attention to holistic concerns, caring only about maintaining some idyllic vision for their own "plot of land" to the detriment of any larger objectives.
I think this is a real concern when divisions within a larger org compartmentalize around code or system boundaries. It is not something to shrug off as if it couldn't happen to you.
Honestly, I've used an unfortunate turn of phrase in my original comment. "Your little plot of land" indeed implies a fixed, entrenched moat. What I meant was something different - the area of code I'm currently working on. That may be a different place with every new task. My coping mechanism isn't building little kingdoms - just focusing on the code a given task involves while purposefully forgetting about the global context of the application, in order to not think about how minuscule and irrelevant the task is to the exciting things the company is doing. That context is usually not useful when doing the changes I've already planned beforehand, and it is emotionally distracting.
I get what your are saying and you are getting a lot of positive reinforcement about this. I would suggest to you a caveat.
I've worked in some orgs where this mentality becomes entrenched. In these new-fangled tech startups with people changing roles and even companies every two years this probably happens less. But I've seen people entrenched into their own kingdoms for decades. An individual, or small team, creates a moat around their "little plot of land" and they become intransigent. This leads to two bad outcomes: they resist any change to their systems or process, going so far as to obfuscate it to protect it. They also don't pay attention to holistic concerns, caring only about maintaining some idyllic vision for their own "plot of land" to the detriment of any larger objectives.
I think this is a real concern when divisions within a larger org compartmentalize around code or system boundaries. It is not something to shrug off as if it couldn't happen to you.