Sheesh, get over yourself. I'm not trying to be a jerk but this is such an obnoxiously braggy complaint.
Yes, companies have complex problems to solve, that require more than a few days or weeks of work at a time. If you want to just wake up every day and decide that you need to work on a totally new project, you're not going to be very useful.
Lots of people have a wide range of interests, but you pick one of the many areas that seems interesting and that you can contribute to, and you work on that for a while and try to make a difference. "Adopting a role when necessary" is not that different from slotting in to a team, since you can often change teams every few months if you want to, or even work across teams.
What you describe is a hard role to define and hire for, but it's a role that many engineers create for themselves by being both great problem solvers and willing to do what is most valuable for the company. Consider that maybe you haven't gone in with the right mindset to make it happen for yourself.
You've heard of "be a multiplier, not an adder", right? My contention is that many good developers can be multipliers across very large portions of an engineering organization when given the chance. Dysfunction does seem to be the natural state of any business, and engineering groups are no exception; technical and social resources capable of and empowered to tackle cross-cutting concerns are that chance I'm describing and provide self-evident benefits over the long term. You're right, that sometimes it happens informally. I am asserting that institutionalizing it makes teams faster, less risky, and happier.
I also happen to think that I'd be good at it, because it's kind of what I already do, and I wish it was more common because that'd be great. Heaven forfend. I mean, you can try to pull the well-actually-it's-labor-that's-bad thing by trying to turn it into my mindset is wrong rather than let's talk about executive and managerial allocation of resources and whether we do a good job of it across the board, but the thing speaks for itself.
And you're right, that post is braggy. It's also marketing: from this thread I've gotten two emails inquiring as to the state of my pipeline and if I'd have time for a chat. It can be both self-marketing and a reasonable observation of reality. (Email's in my profile.)
Yes, companies have complex problems to solve, that require more than a few days or weeks of work at a time. If you want to just wake up every day and decide that you need to work on a totally new project, you're not going to be very useful.
Lots of people have a wide range of interests, but you pick one of the many areas that seems interesting and that you can contribute to, and you work on that for a while and try to make a difference. "Adopting a role when necessary" is not that different from slotting in to a team, since you can often change teams every few months if you want to, or even work across teams.
What you describe is a hard role to define and hire for, but it's a role that many engineers create for themselves by being both great problem solvers and willing to do what is most valuable for the company. Consider that maybe you haven't gone in with the right mindset to make it happen for yourself.