Undefined Engineering Boundaries Drive Ownership Chaos, Slower Incident Response and Burnout

An article on DEV Community argues that unclear ownership of systems, rather than poor code or junior engineers, is the root cause of engineering chaos. Teams often inherit sprawling legacy tools and integrations because no one formally declared them out of scope. This ambiguity lengthens incident response, as alerts bounce between teams while no one clearly holds responsibility. Senior and Staff engineers also lose much of their time to ad-hoc requests and unowned systems, hurting strategic work. The author recommends a tiered "will do / will not do" charter, ownership tied to a service catalog, and leadership support for saying no to scope creep.