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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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

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