Right, but somehow the "situational awareness" argument doesn't fly when it's a developer working at two places. Then it's all "oh no, you might steal our secrets with your brain", even though that's the same thing, just framed differently.
[EDIT] Oh, and:
> You have to collect this data for yourself because it's not like there's a service you can subscribe to that shows you all the problems that various public companies have.
Actually, there is! It's called management consulting. The main value they provide aside from the much-cited blame-absorbing one, is being a normalized and accepted method of corporate espionage. They call it stuff like "industry best practices" but what they're doing is telling you what your competitors are up to, so you can mimic the good parts.
Contractors can and do work at multiple places. Full time employees cannot, sort of by definition. It’s an interesting discussion why most developers end up being full time employees.
It's the same for programming projects. It's good to work on more than one, so you can pick apart intrinsic problems that nobody knows the answer to and just artifacts of one particular codebase.
You have to collect this data for yourself because it's not like there's a service you can subscribe to that shows you all the problems that various public companies have.