At least in pre git days many large companies had people whose entire job it was to merge and resolve merge conflicts. They were not part of the project teams.

At least in pre git days many large companies had people whose entire job it was to merge and resolve merge conflicts. They were not part of the project teams. They were part of the build and deployment team. Granted in any sane company this should just be done by the devs themselves. But as the OP said, in most teams knowledge about versioning, branching and version control is very very limited. Even if all you know is how to do a rebase of a longer lived feature branch easily in git (skipping the commits from the other branch) you will be the wizard that everyone goes to. Many many devs will not even attempt a regular rebase. It's black magic for them. If all you desire is a cozy job in a large company with braindead processes and policies this sort of thing is probably enough to be tipping the scales towards: well we shouldn't lay off that guy coz he's the only one that can work the version control magic AND he codes like mad. If you wanna stick out in a company filled with John Carmacks you will have to do better, sure.