My favorite example of the heroic engineers are "helicopter" engineers who fly in, "solve" the problem at the expense of something else being made much worse. Usually getting the accolades of upper management.

Then the heroic engineers get promoted and then learn that they can use their weight to shove others around. Meanwhile the ICs that had to do fire drills to make crap happen don't typically get anything out of it, other than watching some manager that shoved them around get promoted.

How does it depend? It’s remarkably easy to send someone a message and ask rather than just scheduling a meeting over top. It’s a basic social skill and basic courtesy.

But then why do a rather passive-aggressive calendar booking instead of first pinging folks on chat and asking "hey we really need your help asap but there is no gap in the calendar, could we work sth out"? No matter seniority.

To me this seems like a matter of company culture that is set from the top. If CTO and VP level act like that, it trickles down and that tone becomes the norm. In either way.