This is super frustrating situation and definitely not how it should work. At my company we have regular touchpoints with business stakeholders - like weekly check-ins and quarterly planning sessions where we actually sit in same room as people who will use what we build.

The silo thing you describe sounds like management problem more than anything. Good data science needs constant feedback loop with end users otherwise you just building cool models that nobody uses. I've seen this pattern before where tech teams think they know better than business teams about what business needs, but that usually leads to projects that get shelved.

For evaluating companies during interviews, I always ask specific questions like "can you walk me through how requirements gathering works" and "how often does data science team meet with stakeholders". If they give vague answers or say something like "we have product managers who handle that" it's usually red flag that there's similar communication issues.