I had just started troubleshooting an issue on a production server the other
day, when one of the managers got wind of the problem and wanted to hop on a
IM session with me so we could both figure out the problem as it was
'critical'. Please, no.

First of all, he did not even have a user account on the server in
question, let alone root access. So after creating an account for him, he
kept digging up issues that were not really problems at all, just a
misunderstanding of how normal system processes work on that box. To make
matters worse, before I could even explain what was going on, he was
blasting emails about his 'findings' to the rest of the systems group,
almost in realtime. What should have taken about five minutes of log
analysis and 10 seconds to restart a failed process and enable a watchdog
cron entry turned into a wasted hour. Seriously, managers, stop getting
'hands on' and just let your employees fix things.