There's also the prevailing management theory that "all staff can do the same job" -- I've seen this in various perverted and butchered variants of Lean and Agi

There's also the prevailing management theory that "all staff can do the same job" -- I've seen this in various perverted and butchered variants of Lean and Agile. The theory is sound -- at least two engineers on a project should know how a given functional unit works. It's a practice for lessening the impact of "bus factor", where you have one engineer everyone relies on because they're "the one person in the whole company who understands it". The issue is when this kind of thinking reaches management, and you see someone being pushed into a role when their skill set is radically different to what's needed. And then there's surprise and finger-pointing when things (inevitably) go wrong...