Comment by Tor3

  "I cannot help but read this whole experience as: “We forced an engineer to   take sales calls and we found out that the issue was that our PMs are doing a terrible job communicating between customer and engineering, and our DevOps engineer is more capable/actionable at turning customer needs into working solutions.”

I disagree - there are real limits on how PMs and others can describe how customers feel about products. At my workplace I've always argued for rotating engineers through customer support now and then. As someone who did customer support AND development at the same time, I noticed the wall between developers working in isolation and others who also worked customers. You can work from specifications alone, and they may well be perfect specifications validated by customers, but if you're not actually seeing what they do you can't really understand.

Working with customers now and then simply translates to better products and also less maintenance issues, which is _better_ for said developer.