[nearbuy]

In addition, as someone used to working on small teams, specialization seems inefficient.

If you only have 3 developers, it doesn't make much sense to have one backend, one frontend, and one dev-ops. Are you always going to have exactly equal amounts of work for all three to do each day?

But apart from that, it also seems so much easier to divide up work by feature without stepping on anyone's toes. Like, you code search, I'll code chat. Not you code search backend, I'll code search frontend. That increases overhead and coordination.

And then, if your frontend is heavy on JavaScript, there's often a lot of similar code between frontend and backend. Validation is a classic example. A more extreme example might be a browser game using WebSockets and lockstep simulation. The browser and server might share most of their code. It would be absurd to split all the developers into frontend and backend in this case.