Looking at the author's background, it's easier to say generalists are undervalued when you're a freelancer/agency - you kind of have the freedom to work on pro

Looking at the author's background, it's easier to say generalists are undervalued when you're a freelancer/agency - you kind of have the freedom to work on projects for 3-6 months, punt them, and move on to the next. When you're a bigger product organization, more specialized approaches can work better since you're better suited to find the right trade-off of "speed" vs "future-proofness". This can backfire too though - many specialists can get lost in the weeds and over-engineer solutions that can cripple a business with maintenance costs simply because they want to increase their depth. I think this entire contextualization is kind of ridiculous though. If you were to categorize short fat vs tall skinny vs T, you might see something like: fullstack eng vs ML researcher vs backend engineer w/ ETL experience The fact is that fullstacks _are_ utility players. I don't know that they're really at liberty to "take the helm" if they're not well-versed in the technology that differentiates the company (or team).