Nicholas C. Zakas:
Not good enough comes in many forms. The most obvious is in the front-end: every company I’ve been at that focused on hiring generalists has had a terrible time getting any sort of quality front-end built. Designers get frustrated because the engineers can’t figure out how to make what they designed, product managers are frustrated because the front-end is a key differentiator to end users.
This was published last year, but I’m just coming across it as I think it’s interesting and relevant. By definition generalists can all do front-end, but in my experience even if it ends up looking good, it’s a different story under the hood. Moreover most of generalist have a justified dislike for actual doing front-end development as it’s a deviation from a typical programming environment where code is written for one platform.
He goes on to argue that:
Eventually, every successful company will hire their first specialist – it’s a virtual certainty. The first step is to figure out how to hire that specialist. You need to accept that your current interview process probably doesn’t apply.
I think many companies actually understand this, but carry on with there standard process because it’s time consuming process to figure out what needs to change.