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This changes with the size of the firm you're part of. It's true for individual pursuits like basketball, drawing comics, or entrepreneurship. But a big corpo

This changes with the size of the firm you're part of. It's true for individual pursuits like basketball, drawing comics, or entrepreneurship. But a big corporation gets around a lack of any one critical variable by hiring someone for that variable. So if you're an excellent backend engineer, your time is wasted learning digital art, because somebody else will be making the artwork. Effectively the corporation becomes the organism and you become one specialized organelle in them. You're better off increasing your expertise within that specialty than learning other ones - say by firsthand experience with all the ways distributed systems can fail. The returns to being a top individual producer beat the top returns to being a corporate drones, but the average returns are significantly worse (because the big corporation benefits from being able to swap out individual motivated actors to plug deficiencies rather than having to develop skills itself), so depending on your risk tolerance, this may or may not be a good strategy.

adrianmonk 7y ago
> So if you're an excellent backend engineer, your time is wasted learning digital art, because somebody else will be making the artwork. Tangentially, as a backend engineer, I've had to tell the people who made the digital art that the additional icon they supplied me wasn't quite the same color as the existing ones it was supposed to match and also looked misaligned because it didn't follow the same geometrical conventions. So I wish what you're saying were true, but it isn't necessarily. This being a tangent, I'm not necessarily looking for a moral to the story here, but maybe it's something about having a certain minimum competence in an area so you can be sure you're working effectively with others. (EDIT: What is a backend engineer doing with an icon at all? Sticking the URL where it's hosted into a config file and modifying the logic so that it shows up (or doesn't) as appropriate, then testing that by looking at the UI and seeing art that looks wrong.)

adrianmonk 7y ago

> So if you're an excellent backend engineer, your time is wasted learning digital art, because somebody else will be making the artwork. Tangentially, as a backend engineer, I've had to tell the people who made the digital art that the additional icon they supplied me wasn't quite the same color as the existing ones it was supposed to match and also looked misaligned because it didn't follow the same geometrical conventions. So I wish what you're saying were true, but it isn't necessarily. This being a tangent, I'm not necessarily looking for a moral to the story here, but maybe it's something about having a certain minimum competence in an area so you can be sure you're working effectively with others. (EDIT: What is a backend engineer doing with an icon at all? Sticking the URL where it's hosted into a config file and modifying the logic so that it shows up (or doesn't) as appropriate, then testing that by looking at the UI and seeing art that looks wrong.)