[This is a bit of a hot take - I really enjoyed your piece! I've been trying to refine the below for the last half an hour so please excuse me if it's a little rough or repetitive, but I thought it would be better to submit it now rather than let it sit for five days and then not submit it anyway.]
It's important to me for the health of the team and the application that everybody knows how everthing works to some degree, if only so that when half the team gets the flu the other half can still change the CSS, write tests, talk to the client, etc.
I'm not demanding that the frontend specialist become a JVM performance ninja. But each developer in my team cannot be solely responsible for a single technology.
They must be responsible to the customer. The customer doesn't see a stack; they see a website. The website is either working or it isn't. The customer isn't going to complain about the JavaScript load time, they're going to complain about the website being slow.
It's the responsibility of the whole team to make sure that the website working - that's every layer of the stack. I want to employ curious and motivated developers who are willing to learn outside their area of expertise in order to better support the team and, ultimately, serve the customer.
So, yes, I'm happy to hire the K8s veteran (how veteran can you be in Kubernetes? It's like 5 minutes old!) and the CSS expert, but what's more important than their specialism is that they are more focused on their team and the customer than any particular technology.
[This is a bit of a hot take - I really enjoyed your piece! I've been trying to refine the below for the last half an hour so please excuse me if it's a little rough or repetitive, but I thought it would be better to submit it now rather than let it sit for five days and then not submit it anyway.]
It's important to me for the health of the team and the application that everybody knows how everthing works to some degree, if only so that when half the team gets the flu the other half can still change the CSS, write tests, talk to the client, etc.
I'm not demanding that the frontend specialist become a JVM performance ninja. But each developer in my team cannot be solely responsible for a single technology.
They must be responsible to the customer. The customer doesn't see a stack; they see a website. The website is either working or it isn't. The customer isn't going to complain about the JavaScript load time, they're going to complain about the website being slow.
It's the responsibility of the whole team to make sure that the website working - that's every layer of the stack. I want to employ curious and motivated developers who are willing to learn outside their area of expertise in order to better support the team and, ultimately, serve the customer.
So, yes, I'm happy to hire the K8s veteran (how veteran can you be in Kubernetes? It's like 5 minutes old!) and the CSS expert, but what's more important than their specialism is that they are more focused on their team and the customer than any particular technology.
Thanks David, I really appreciate the feedback!