I think you hit the nail on the head here. As an anecdotal example, I was hired as a software developer on a team of mostly electrical engineers, and our group

I think you hit the nail on the head here. As an anecdotal example, I was hired as a software developer on a team of mostly electrical engineers, and our group develops software/supports the energy management system at a major utility company. Now when I was interviewing, what the team seemed to like the most was my background in actual electric utility operations (I was in the electrical trades for a long time before I figured out that I wanted to study CS). I was the only person on the team with actual operations experience. My boss love it because I could go and talk with the operators, and speak "operator" with them. It made translating their requests into features/upgrades/updates a lot easier for our team, and our customer service improved as a result. By having that background in operations, which was different from the rest of my team, I was able to bring a different perspective, and most importantly, the perspective of our customers to our day to day work.