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While amazing generalists/full-stack guys are great, having very strong individuals own a particular domain of the code can have its benefits as well. Sure, you miss a bit of oversight, but when you're in the building phase and you just want to Get Shit Done, it helps if you don't have someone else mucking around in your code while you're building it.

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Absolutely, hence my comment towards the end about having T-shaped individuals. I worked on a startup team recently where responsibilities were pretty cleanly divided: I worked on the front end, and a coworker worked on the backend.

Both of us were much stronger at our chosen domains than the other, but we were also both strong enough on the other end to fill in any gaps. If we were doing mostly front-end stuff for a sprint, he was able to jump in without me having to worry about it, and vice-versa.

IMO, that's the kind of full-stack developers that early-stage startups (that aren't specifically tech-focused, eg language processing) need.

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