I've worked in two of these top investment banks and the amount of red tape that needs to be crossed is just breathtaking. Something as simple as provisioning a kafka topic? Go raise 2 requests, have it approved by these 4 people including your manager, then create multiple system accounts for each environment, each with its own approval steps. Agreed that these approvals and audit trails are necessary - but surely they can be simplified.

In office - you always knew someone who knew someone in that team. It was just a matter of picking up the phone, calling them and getting them to expedite your request. Now that everyone is WFH, you ping them on IM and wait for them to respond. With back-to-back zoom calls, it's honestly the last thing people want to do.

Couple that with the fact that there isn't a divide (like commute) between work and home anymore - so there's just more fatigue and higher levels of irritability.