I take your point. Hiring aside, though, I don’t know anywhere in the tech world where people specialize as much as they do in large, FAANG-like organizations.

I take your point. Hiring aside, though, I don’t know anywhere in the tech world where people specialize as much as they do in large, FAANG-like organizations. I remember a fantastic Medium post by some self-taught/bootcamp coder who made his way into Uber and specialized in time-series databases, making himself the resident expert and developing deep knowledge of these databases. This quickly pulled him up the ranks and got him better compensation and recognition for his work. Now he is a uniquely qualified specialist in a deep niche. FAANGs are full of people with deep knowledge like this, because there are so many niche problems that require strong specialization. Perhaps you could argue they’re all T-shaped generalists, but then the lines between “specialist” and “generalist” become quite blurred.