Developers can only do so much

I read this great article where the author really drives home that “it’s a myth that doing your job well requires focus at the expense of understanding the holistic view of how products are built.”

Which in my opinion is sound advice. But, in my experience most organizations are always always pushing the team to work in a specifically scoped set of bugs and new features, and doing the work to obtain that holistic view is implicitly discouraged.

Another article addressed this point with Developers can’t fix bad management, where the author points out that management really has to help developers gain that holistic view.

I strongly agree with the idea that managers really need to facilitate developers gaining a holistic view of the software they work on.

What about you guys? Is this just primarily a developer problem, or does the broader organization and management behavior play a bigger role?

Edit: fixed bad link