One of my former colleagues on the Windows kernel team wasn’t afraid to make changes all across the system when necessary. If the engineering team decided to upgrade to a new version of the C++ compiler, my colleague was the one who gave it a test-drive on the entire Windows source code, and fixed all the warnings and errors that kick up as well as ensuring that it passed the build verification tests before updating the compiler in the official toolset. Beyond that, my colleague also ran around being a superhero, writing tools that needed to be written, fixing tools that were broken, and generally being somebody. Since the effect on the Windows project was so far-reaching, everybody on the team knew this person, or at least recognized the name, and as a result, my colleage ended up receiving a lot of email about all different parts of Windows, be they bug reports, requests for help using a particular component, whatever. And when the question was about something outside my colleague’s sphere of responsibility, the message was forwarded to the correct people with a simple introduction:

From: A
To: XYZ-owners, Y
Subject: Problem with XYZ

Fan mail.

From: Y
To: A
Subject: Problem with XYZ

Blah blah blah blah

I’ve used this technique a few times, but it’s been a while. I should start using it again.

Bonus chatter: At least one of you has come out and said that you post your complaints here with the expectation that the complaints will be forwarded to the appropriate team. This expectation is false. No such forwarding occurs. This Web site is not a complaint desk.