[mgkimsal]

There's a balance to be struck. Specialization brings with is tunnel-vision, and having the bulk of people on a dev team have a decent understanding of the other parts of the stack is certainly useful to help avoiding that.

Jack-of-all-trades devs have a place, but dedicated people in specific roles also have a place. Those places will change and move over time as the nature of the project and the business changes (initial dev in to maintenance, early market upstart vs established leader, etc). Understanding and accepting that role changes may be necessary is probably the hardest thing for some business to accept, and properly making those changes (filling roles with good hires) is arguably one of the hardest things to execute on.