I'm with you on that. I come from a background of Dev and have been called DevOps (by others), although I just call myself a problem solver.
The realization that I really needed to understand what happens in operations for me came around '09, when the Xbox Operations Center called me and told me my code wasn't working, and we had such a wall between us that I couldn't see what was going on, and they couldn't describe it either.
I ended up writing automated publishing pipelines for them to take the most risky parts of their dozens of pages word doc and writing tools to do this for them automatically. Most people didn't even think this was a thing that could be done, let alone should be done. Problem solved!
I think people who are territorial are inherently insecure in their skills and therefore fear getting out of their comfort zone. Generalists are far better than specialists in my opinion. You want someone to go where the problems are, rather than people who invent new problems for others in their own little empire. I think a lot of big companies are so big they can have people silo'd all day, so people don't even think about the people and systems they are affecting.
The realization that I really needed to understand what happens in operations for me came around '09, when the Xbox Operations Center called me and told me my code wasn't working, and we had such a wall between us that I couldn't see what was going on, and they couldn't describe it either.
I ended up writing automated publishing pipelines for them to take the most risky parts of their dozens of pages word doc and writing tools to do this for them automatically. Most people didn't even think this was a thing that could be done, let alone should be done. Problem solved!
I think people who are territorial are inherently insecure in their skills and therefore fear getting out of their comfort zone. Generalists are far better than specialists in my opinion. You want someone to go where the problems are, rather than people who invent new problems for others in their own little empire. I think a lot of big companies are so big they can have people silo'd all day, so people don't even think about the people and systems they are affecting.