I think it's wonderful that we have created a tech ecosystem (a techosystem?) that allows people to contribute with only a very narrow knowledge of things—or, i

I think it's wonderful that we have created a tech ecosystem (a techosystem?) that allows people to contribute with only a very narrow knowledge of things—or, in less positive terms, that allows companies to hire cheaper labor because fewer skills are required. I believe there are many cases where a mediocre solution is better than no solution at all. The internet of 1995-2005 was built on mediocre solutions. It was a blast. Deep-dive experts are not a dying breed, they're not a limited resource with secret knowledge from a time before abstractions. We have more of them now than ever before. They're not defined by having worked all the way up and down the stack, but by having the curiosity to look into layers that are not their own, because not only are we adding more abstraction layers on top, we're also changing some of the layers down the stack: NVMe, WebGPU, WebAssembly, QUIC, AVX512 ! But deep-dive experts are a luxury that most teams don't need, and one of the most important skills of a technical manager is, I would argue, to know when they absolutely must hire one.