I've been noodling about this for years now, without really coming up with such a concise thesis. A notable example from my prior job: There was a developer w

I've been noodling about this for years now, without really coming up with such a concise thesis. A notable example from my prior job: There was a developer who during the early phase of cloud adoption, wrote some wrappers in powershell for the Azure Powershell cmdlets. They did some quality of life of stuff, and he checked into source control dozens of these wrappers. I recall it being about 80. He got talked about as the azure guy. Some time goes by. I need to do some Azure automation, so I look into those wrappers. They don't do anything useful for most use cases; I write my own automation from scratch. I go on to have many interactions with this dev; he doesn't really know Azure particularly well, but still has the reputation of being the azure guy. I am pretty sure nobody calling him the azure guy actually ever used any of those scripts, and I'm similarly confident those scripts never got used for anything even by him. Don't get me wrong - was a smart and nice guy, and a good dev and great at his job. But - the mythos he had built with those ~80 files checked into source control allowed him to find opportunities to work with Azure and get to know it better. I eventually left the company. Who knows, maybe he really is an Azure guru now?