Well, in my experience, specialists for a given topic are significantly faster and deliver better quality than what generalists can deliver.
Sure, there’s some advantages to being a generalist, e.g. you can tweak the API in the backend and adjust the frontend at the same time.
Or introduce a configuration value and integrate that into the deployment script.
Or even plan future features while keeping sane development practices in mind.
But aside from such cross-cutting concerns, I, as a backend dev with some forays into frontend and devops and planning, simply can’t compete with anyone that mainly does frontend or ops or management. They’ll throw something down in a day for which I’d need a week.
I assume, management people mainly favor fullstack-ish devs, because it gives them flexibility while planning. If you’ve got a frontend specialist and no frontend topics, you’ve got a problem. Whereas if you’ve got a fullstack dev, they can at least try to be useful with pretty much whatever topic you need solved.
When you want the job done poorly and slowly.
Can you elaborate on this?
Well, in my experience, specialists for a given topic are significantly faster and deliver better quality than what generalists can deliver.
Sure, there’s some advantages to being a generalist, e.g. you can tweak the API in the backend and adjust the frontend at the same time.
Or introduce a configuration value and integrate that into the deployment script.
Or even plan future features while keeping sane development practices in mind.
But aside from such cross-cutting concerns, I, as a backend dev with some forays into frontend and devops and planning, simply can’t compete with anyone that mainly does frontend or ops or management. They’ll throw something down in a day for which I’d need a week.
I assume, management people mainly favor fullstack-ish devs, because it gives them flexibility while planning. If you’ve got a frontend specialist and no frontend topics, you’ve got a problem. Whereas if you’ve got a fullstack dev, they can at least try to be useful with pretty much whatever topic you need solved.