The difference between a good developer and a bad is understanding the stack. Not necessarily an expert but I spend a lot of time debugging for random issues and it could be dns or a file locking issue or a network or a api or parsing EDI whatever. Most recently I found a bug in software that had to do with how Windows runs 32 bit mode on 64 bit. I've never used windows professionally and I have only had unix machines since I got a free Ubuntu CD. Yet I figured it out in like 20 minutes exploring the differences between the paths when running in two scenarios. Idk maybe I'm a genius, I don't think so, but I was able to solve the problem because I know just barely enough about enough things to poke shit and break them or make them light up. Compare that to a dev on my team who needed help writing a series of command line prompts to do a simple bit of textual adjustments and pipe some data around.

I'm not a even good developer. But I know enough to chime in on calls and provide useful and generally 'Wizarding' knowledge. Like a detective with a good hunch.

But yeah just autocomplete everything lol

It's great that you were able to debug that. It may have come at an opportunity cost of being able to solve some more specialized problem within your domain.

In my job I develop a React Native app. I also need to have a decent understanding of iOS and Android native code. If I run into a bug related to how iOS runs 32 bit vs 64 bit software? Not my problem, we'll open a ticket with Apple and block the ticket in our system.

I guess I never have enough leverage to order Apple to fix stuff. I'm like water and gravity. It's just a random example though and I agree you do give up a lot by being a generalist. However for most people we don't do really new or hard problems. Its a lot of spaghetti

I don't think of it as spaghetti but as messy plumbing.

> we'll open a ticket with Apple and block the ticket in our system.

Wouldn't it be annoying to be blocked on Apple rather than shipping on your schedule?

If we're blocked on Apple, so is everyone else. A key consideration in shipping high-level software is to avoid using niche features that the vendor might ignore if they're broken.

I don't disagree with you, but I do think it's important to acknowledge that this approach requires someone else to do it. If you're at a big company where there are tons of specialists, then perhaps this is just fine because there is someone available to do it for you. If you find yourself in a different situation, however, where you don't have that other specialist, you could end up significantly blocked for a period of time. If whatever you're working on is not important and can afford to be blocked, then again no problem, but I've been in many situations where what I was doing absolutely had to work and had to work on a timetable. If I had to offload the work to someone else because I wasn't capable, it would have meant disaster.