Same here. I've spent my career hopping between functionally different areas - supply chain, IT, business operations, marketing, BI/Analytics, and a few hybrid/in-between roles.
As you said, every single time, each group tends to trivialize the contributions and efforts of the others.
They also tend to have very little awareness of their own unique privileges. When I'm on a business team, even if I'm doing technical work it takes an absurd amount of effort and approvals to even get local admin access to my computer, whereas when I'm on a technical team it gets rubber stamped and is usually part of the onboarding process. Same with infrastructure - if I need to set up a recurring process/script, it's pretty trivial finding/accessing infrastructure somewhere that I can plop that onto when I'm on a technical team. But god forbid I have the same need while working on a business team - you have to move mountains and requisitions to be able to accomplish the same thing.
There are privileges in the other direction, too. In particular, sales/marketing/account people expense an absurd amount of stuff in the daily happenings of their job, and can choose to do so with little fanfare. Whereas on the IT side, it can be near impossible to spend $10/month on something if there isn't a clear business unit to charge it back to and wasn't in the annual IT budget.
At the end of the day, every group tends to have different internal skillsets and organizational capabilities and restrictions. And all are working just as hard as the other to keep the sausage flowing, within the capacity of their abilities and role. The number of posts and comments on HN about devs struggling with marketing/selling their single person SaaS should be an indicator that you shouldn't trivialize any group's contributions before taking the time to fully understand them.
This is one of the (many) reasons it's good for techies to get out of their bubble. In many cases, knowing someone in another department makes it as easy as "hey, Susan, when you have time could you please..." and it's done tomorrow with zero paperwork.
I worked for a large corp for 17 years and I saw this a lot. After being there for a while I knew a lot of people. People would struggle to figure out how to get something done and my answer was usually something like, "come with me. I'll introduce you to Charlie in Technical Publications and he'll get it done for you."
A personal hunch of mine is that it's also one of the implicit strengths of technical people starting companies. Software engineering teaches you to develop mental frameworks around systems and integrations and abstractions. And once someone with that experience walks a mile on the business side of the house, they're able to develop organizational structures that maximizes the organizational effectiveness as a whole rather than the local maximums within each group that are traditionally found.
Although that's not always what happens, it's an outcome that's unique to such circumstances.
I work for a company the same size, and we have many more applications than this, with lots of overlapping and competing products.
Kudos to management at Github.
Your comment has been my learning in the last six months. Holy mother of god there's so many things that keep the company running.
If you've ever worked for a company 10-100X that size, you'll find this list quite small.
To be honest, I clicked on the comments of this post to check my thesis that HN users would be astonished and was immediately validated.
It's always amusing to me how people who only work in one area of the company (ie. engineers, designers, sales, etc.) think they are the only ones doing "real" work. Everybody else is doing bullshit and wasting money. Without fail, every single time, if you give rank-and-file the opportunity to express this, they will.
Very few people in larger companies understand how the sausage is actually made, how leads are generated for the sausages, how sausage deals are closed, and how the sausage customers are nurtured for continued sausage business.