Part of the idea of a universal standard in bigcorp is so that you can shuffle engineers between projects as they want to and as your strategy/needs change over time. And for cohesion.
Also I think there is a huge benefit for having generally capable employees, even if they are not directly utilizing many of their talents, and not counting the fungibility: they will make generally better decisions when reasoning about things outside their specific work domain and do better in ambiguous, not perfectly-specced situations. And in software at least, having general/complete knowledge and problem solving ability is absolutely vital if you want to be self-sufficient in diagnosing and solving problems, IMO.
Also I think there is a huge benefit for having generally capable employees, even if they are not directly utilizing many of their talents, and not counting the fungibility: they will make generally better decisions when reasoning about things outside their specific work domain and do better in ambiguous, not perfectly-specced situations. And in software at least, having general/complete knowledge and problem solving ability is absolutely vital if you want to be self-sufficient in diagnosing and solving problems, IMO.