I think we might be talking in different time scales, and maybe different responsibilities. If you're looking to bring on someone to solve an urgent problem th

I think we might be talking in different time scales, and maybe different responsibilities. If you're looking to bring on someone to solve an urgent problem this month, you're going to need a specialist in the area. If you're bringing on an early hire to build a team, or another engineer to bolster your team with some specialists, you may want a solid generalist. There might also be some significant difference between organizational structures, if you're joining a team centered around building and supporting a product, or maybe a startup with only one or two products, a generalist might be much more effective. If you're joining a massive organization where there are highly specialized teams dealing with specific problem areas, a specialist makes a lot more sense. As a sweeping statement, I'm better at solving "a problem" than a specialist. If you define the problem area tightly, they may be the right person for the job, but if the role you're hiring for has uncertainty and flexibility, the front end specialist probably isn't the right person to figure out why your database is slow, your load balancer isn't working, your build and deploy process is stuck, etc. There are definitely roles that are much more fit to one or the other, but the generalist can handle a lot of things pretty well. All of that being said, we can probably agree that the best setting is having both.