So, to bring this closer to nanog territory, it's a bit like saying that all the sales and customer support staff should be given enable access to your routers and encouraged to run them on a rotating basis, so that they understand the complexities of BGP and will better understand the impact their decisions will have on your peering.
We encourage managers, designers, engineers, project managers, etc. to spend a day handling customer support calls so that they understand the impacts of their decisions/work on the customer, who ultimately pays our paychecks. We run even more people through workshops where they spend some time listening to recorded customer support calls, and then plan how to prevent such problems in future so that the customers don't feel the need to call us. Of course, none of these people are expected to go in and reconfigure BGP sessions on routers, because there are working on first-line support. One of the duties of first-line support is to sift through the incoming and identify which cases need to be escalated to second or third-line support. Unless you have very good automated systems in place to ensure that the abuse desk only gets real cases to deal with, then you should be able to rotate managers and other employees through the abuse department to do some of that first-line sifting. If the outcome of this is that you make a business case for changes to abuse-desk systems and processes, then you should involve the abuse desk staff in this development work to give them some variety. Once those staff have automated themselves out of a job, you can move them to some other tools development project, or incident response work. --Michael Dillon