You know the saying &quot;quantity has a quality all its own&quot;.* 
Sometimes being able to draw on a wide breadth of experience allows you to see the bigger picture that most people miss. Even in an almost perfectly modular system, you need generalists sitting on the borders.<p>Take the case of a product that consists of a back end API, a single page web app, and a mobile app. Who do you want designing the API? I think ideally the answer is someone who has some experience with all the systems involved.<p>I&#x27;ve been on teams where the back end guys designed the data model and the API and forced the front end to conform to that. And I&#x27;ve been on teams where the front end team ran the show--in my opinion neither situation is optimal.<p>&gt; this means that an expert (someone who is specialized) is always able to crush a FSDev in his own field of expertise. So, FSDevs are always the rookies in all fields, compared to specialized devs.<p>I think there&#x27;s a few different things to say here. First, I think most teams aren&#x27;t really made up of experts. Mostly because most teams can&#x27;t afford to be made up of experts, and because most teams probably don&#x27;t need that many experts.<p>Second, there is a huge amount of overlap in most developer roles, so a lot of experience in one role transitions very well to other roles.<p>Third, most good generalist developers probably have some field that they actually are experts in. You&#x27;ve probably heard the term &quot;T shaped developers&quot;. Their field of expertise might even be something like domain knowledge or management.<p>And finally, for most developers, there is a limit to how specialized you can become. To have along successful career in software development you can&#x27;t afford to become completely specialized. If you plan on writing software for 40 years or more, you&#x27;re probably not going to be a Rails specialist for the entire time.<p>In the end, I think a good team requires a decent mix of specialists and generalists to function well.<p>*usually misattributed to Stalin