5 ms·
I am an "Infrastructure Engineer" by job title, but really I am a jack of all trades. Many people working in small business need to wear many hats. You can be
by jlawer 11y ago
I am an "Infrastructure Engineer" by job title, but really I am a jack of all trades. Many people working in small business need to wear many hats.
You can be deep on a single area (specialist) or be spread out (generalist). Larger businesses want specialists, small business want generalists.
Personally I am a generalist. I deal with security, servers, routers, switches, applications, laptops, Operating Systems, Backup, Databases, etc. I write code in python, java and starting to get better with go. Its a handful and I am always juggling things, but I also think that broad knowledge helps things. I understand TCP/IP because I wrote a TCP/IP stack. I feel I have a better understanding of the complex systems as I have a non trivial understanding of each part.
Its a very different working situation, but it has its advantages and I dread ever going back to a large corporate because of it. It isn't as efficient compared to having a team of specialists, where everyone can spend 100% on their speciality, but on the other hand, you can often do things with surprisingly small teams.
- einrealist 11y agoI share your opinion. In agile teams, it is important to do things that work. If a team owns a stack sucessfully, there is no need to change that. But if the environment changes (e.g. growth), the team may decide to split / specialise in order to ensure that the business goal is not in danger. There is no silver bullet.