Well, it’s more that the problems in an area like ML or security were solvable if you generally knew how computers work and were smart and good at learning new

Well, it’s more that the problems in an area like ML or security were solvable if you generally knew how computers work and were smart and good at learning new things. Switching to a new domain took a few months, but ultimately there wasn’t /so much/ you had to learn. Nowadays, those easy problems are solved. If you want to contribute to an area, you have to learn all the context, read a bunch of papers, it basically takes at least a year. So you can’t quite be a generalist SWE, drop into a random team for three weeks and meaningfully contribute. Put another way, the relative value of spunk and generalist ability has decreased and the relative value of domain knowledge has increased.