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Another wild thing about what Tobi is saying here is it completely ignores the absolute crazy depth of specialization that exists within different engineering disciplines, and the huge value that can bring to companies. (1/?) https://twitter.com/silvestricodes/status/1341836829021114369
Engineers who are deep specialists are absolutely required for large, complex codebases with large, complex products. They provide context, train up new engineers, can pattern match to quickly solve problems, and warn against past mistakes. (2/?)
Have you seen modern engineering stacks? IOS? Android? Frontend? Theyâre universes unto themselves. It takes years and years of focus to master them. This isnât iOS SDK 1.0 anymore. (3/?)
Also, if you have a large engineering team (>20 people), you almost are guaranteed to have specialists in practice anyways â people who work on one part of your stack and product. (4/?)
I also question people who say that âfront endâ or âmobileâ job titles are just a âjuniorâ thing â to me it means they havenât actually ever gone deep on solving a really hard specific problem within the constraints of a platform (aka those platforms your customers use). (5/?)
A lot of the time in my experience, these âgeneralist preferrersâ are people who tend to come into a codebase for 1-2 years, make a bunch of poor decisions from not understanding the platform, and then jet off to some other team to leave others to clean up their mess... (5/?)
...All while feeling that theyâre somehow superior to those engineers who stick around and hone their craft. (6/?)
You want to be a generalist engineer? Sure, ok, great! But if youâre coming in to work with specialist engineers on their platform, you should probably defer to them and listen to them very carefully. (/end)
Oh also one other thing I hate about takes like this: It assumes the only way to be a generalist is to do a breadth of eng things. Iâd rather have a great iOS-only engineer who also has an eye for design, product, and has customer empathy â these take time to learn too.
