> the best engineers I know stick to one thing long enough to know it deeply The age-old generalist vs specialist discussion is pretty interesting. As a small

> the best engineers I know stick to one thing long enough to know it deeply The age-old generalist vs specialist discussion is pretty interesting. As a small anecdote, I'd say that the best engineer I know is very much a specialist. He can correctly set up loads of servers and infrastructure on all kinds of cloud services without much difficulty. But he's almost useless when it comes to building a good product on his own. Ask him to put together a simple contact form? Oh, he can probably eventually figure it out, but he'll cobble together some of the worst HTML/CSS with a crap UI you've ever seen. Personally, I think that specialists can be incredibly talented and useful, but there's a reason that generalists rule the web. There's a thousand different ways to solve any problem online. Having a really broad base of knowledge of different aspects of technology gives you a lot more insight into the different ways to solve a problem that a specialist might not be able to see. That said, it's usually a team that builds a product. A good team can have some expert specialists in key domains, and put good generalists in a position to build great products.