[RonanTheGrey]

Facebook can afford (nay, NEEDS) to rise to that level of specialization. But that's only going to be true at the level of a megacorp, like Facebook, or Google, or Microsoft.

For even moderately sized companies, someone with wider knowledge will fare better, because such companies aren't going to spend $500k/yr on someone who doesn't know algorithms (or on someone who ONLY knows algorithms). The marginal cost to Facebook is near zero, the marginal cost to a smaller company certainly is not.

[danabramov]

To be clear, once you get in, there is no actual distinction. People can choose any team, and "front end" people sometimes work on the backend or mobile or services or IDE or a compiler, etc. We try to hire generalists.