But it is a pretty much a lost argument here because (1) developers aren't shielded, (2) developers are as vulnerable to social engineering as any infosec (but probably even more vulnerable if said infosec workers are very careful). The issue is the effort is neligible in a manhunt. For non-nation state actors like you and I, sure, it takes a huge effort. But if you don't everyone, then there is very little gain from hiding only people in infosec. In my experience, a lot of developers have production access. Compliance do not care if developers have access or not, auditors only care about if approval is in place and audit report can be produced without tampering. Also, in many enterprise, infosec often don't have access to actual production, they are just managing incident response process. Therefore, it is not usual to see massive social engineering, because it only takes one victim. Even if said victim has no access to most of the data, a breach in network is already a gold mine.
Also, you probably are familiar, sites like LinkedIn can be a great source for getting list of employees, and guessing company email is usually takes some effort once the attacker figures out the naming convention of email addresses.
Anyway, partial information is just as bad as full disclosure when the unhidden secrets are just as useful as the hidden one. So we either hide everything or we don't hide anything.
