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In my experience, this is pretty far from true. I've worked with developers who tried to cover all of these skill sets and instead of being good developers they

In my experience, this is pretty far from true. I've worked with developers who tried to cover all of these skill sets and instead of being good developers they end up being pretty shallow generalists. Research is a zero sum game and picking "everything" just means you have small amounts of surface knowledge for many topics instead of deep knowledge of a few.

jacobr1 8y ago
The difference is that today it is possible to "enough" generalization on top of managed services and cloud infrastructure that you can be deep on cloud deployments + full-stack webdev, or cloud deployments + game engines or whatever that avoiding the need to have horizontal separation of teams gives significant leverage. The teams that own their stack end-to-end (on top of other external systems and teams, true) can move faster that those that require internal coordination and they can do it without losses in quality/availability/stability.
lstamour 8y ago
The hard part for me is finding the time to do it all myself—even if I can learn it all, it simply doesn’t scale to wait for me to do all the work, and somehow fix my own bugs/problems with my ideas. But knowing something about everything does make it easier to work with others and defer to their expertise while also offering suggestions or doing an extra bit of code review. My personal preference is to look up best practices as I need to, just-in-time, or just get it done if I’ve done something similar recently. It’s really important to work with others though, especially when they’ve specialized knowledge and experience to share. Building it yourself or as a generalist alone often means a lot of learning-it-the-hard-way. But it’s always possible, if you can accept the tradeoffs or build a smaller subset of a system.
rawoke083600 8y ago
"Research is a zero sum game" - I don't agree with that.. Having insights into both processes i.e DevOps + Dev will most likely make you better at both !
- auslander 8y ago
  > make you better at both You'll get insights, as you correctly worded, good. Thing is, designing production infra takes much more than that. Years of telecom experience for example, where downtime is not an option, deep linux and network knowledge, HA designs and lessons from past mistakes. That cannot be learned overnight, and you get sixth sense if it looks right or not. Add to that AWS SA Pro cert, Python and you'll be getting somewhere :)
  - fogetti 8y ago
    LOL. I worked in Nokia Networks for quite some time. > downtime is not an option HAHAHA - sure. Of course.

jacobr1 8y ago

The difference is that today it is possible to "enough" generalization on top of managed services and cloud infrastructure that you can be deep on cloud deployments + full-stack webdev, or cloud deployments + game engines or whatever that avoiding the need to have horizontal separation of teams gives significant leverage. The teams that own their stack end-to-end (on top of other external systems and teams, true) can move faster that those that require internal coordination and they can do it without losses in quality/availability/stability.

lstamour 8y ago

The hard part for me is finding the time to do it all myself—even if I can learn it all, it simply doesn’t scale to wait for me to do all the work, and somehow fix my own bugs/problems with my ideas. But knowing something about everything does make it easier to work with others and defer to their expertise while also offering suggestions or doing an extra bit of code review. My personal preference is to look up best practices as I need to, just-in-time, or just get it done if I’ve done something similar recently. It’s really important to work with others though, especially when they’ve specialized knowledge and experience to share. Building it yourself or as a generalist alone often means a lot of learning-it-the-hard-way. But it’s always possible, if you can accept the tradeoffs or build a smaller subset of a system.

rawoke083600 8y ago

"Research is a zero sum game" - I don't agree with that.. Having insights into both processes i.e DevOps + Dev will most likely make you better at both !

auslander 8y ago
> make you better at both You'll get insights, as you correctly worded, good. Thing is, designing production infra takes much more than that. Years of telecom experience for example, where downtime is not an option, deep linux and network knowledge, HA designs and lessons from past mistakes. That cannot be learned overnight, and you get sixth sense if it looks right or not. Add to that AWS SA Pro cert, Python and you'll be getting somewhere :)
- fogetti 8y ago
  LOL. I worked in Nokia Networks for quite some time. > downtime is not an option HAHAHA - sure. Of course.