My answer is yes to both of those

If other peoples work is reliant on yours then you should know how their part of the system transforms your inputs

Similarly you should fully understand how all the inputs to your part of the system are generated

No matter your coupling pattern, if you have more than 1 person product, knowing at least one level above and below your stack is a baseline expectation

This is true with personnel leadership too, I should be able to troubleshoot one level above and below me to some level of capacity.

> I've seen what it looks like when a company hires mostly researchers and ignores other expertise, versus what happens when a company hires diverse talent sets to build a cross domain team. The second option works way better.

I've seen these too, and you aren't wrong. Division into specializations can work "way better" (i.e. the overall potential is higher), but in practice the differentiating factors that matter will come down to organizational and ultimately human-factors. The anecdotal cases I draw my observations from organizations operating at the scale of 1-10 people, as well as 1,000s working in this field.

> Should your reseacher have to manage nvidia drivers and infiniband networking? Should your operations engineer need to understand the math behind transformers? Does your researcher really gain any value from understanding the intricacies of docker layer caching?

To realize the higher potential mentioned above, what they need to be doing is appreciating the value of what those things are and those who do those things beyond: these are the people that do the things I don't want to do or don't want to understand. That appreciation usually comes from having done and understanding that work.

When specializations are used, they tend to also manifest into organizational structures and dynamics which are ultimately comprised of humans. Conway's Law is worth mentioning here because the interfaces between these specializations become the bottleneck of your system in realizing that "higher potential."

As another commenter mentions, the effectiveness of these interfaces, corresponding bottlenecking effects, and ultimately the entire people-driven system is very much driven by how the parties on each side understand each other's work/methods/priorities/needs/constraints/etc, and having an appreciation for how they affect (i.e. complement) each other and the larger system.