I've been guilty of that myself. Question is, which problem? There are so many problems (some of them personal, some of them management won't say out loud) and everyone has their own priority queue.

Maybe the real problem isn't even technical. Maybe Jim and Tom just hate each other because something happened when they first met. We can keep arguing about haproxy vs nginx 'til the cows come home, or I could say to myself, "Hey, they both listen to Kevin, I'm gonna go ask him for a favor..." but that's kinda passing the buck.

My biggest success not falling back to other people for this was Ben, who yelled at me - in an open office plan - the first time I asked him for help. It took most of a year of me making smalltalk at the coffee machine before he was happy to see me coming, instead of avoiding eye contact. I think at some point he figured out we think alike on certain BS technical limitations, and then I started getting smiles.

If you can't tell from this that I'm fond of cats, especially shy or cantankerous ones, well...