One thing I realized a few days ago is that there is plenty of usability research that says programmers can't think like new users - because once you understand something, it's hard to pretend that you don't understand it and thus imagine how users will experience your thing the first time they see it.  I think it's pretty well known at this point that this usability research exists.

What I haven't actually heard is the usability research that says that software developers are no good at understanding the needs of their users outside of this specific new-user situation.

I think people are nowadays trying to claim the latter while using data from the former.  And I think I have fallen for it myself.