Don’t think so. These things are par for the course if your dev team is several hundred people and -above all- focused on keeping things running exactly as they were before. Communication and waiting becomes 90% of your job.
I agree. However, I would sincerely love to be wrong about this, and would sincerely love to hear counterexamples from folks who work on large engineering teams that have somehow not devolved into lots of non-productive stuff.
The engineer side of my brain says that yes, of course it's possible. You could run a very tight engineering ship with just the right level of autonomy between a number of exactly-right-sized teams. You would employ some percentage of your engineers to ensure that the other engineers were maximally productive. Etc. This stuff is all extremely possible in a vacuum.
The pragmatic side of my brain says that, while technically possible, any organization that has grown to include a medium-to-large engineering team has almost surely done so in ways that preclude the sort of "ideal" engineering environment mentioned above.
The typical failure mode here is, of course, a company that manages to defy the odds and experiences success, but takes on a large amount of technical debt during their early days of manic growth and then spends the next N years dealing with it.
