[rganguly]

If you want to build a successful startup, your ability to wear many hats and push more than one aspect of the product forward in the early days is super valuable. If that's your goal, continue to straddle the fence.

If you're thinking about this inside of an organization, you have to decide what kind of person you want to be: the nail or the glue.

It's possible to not specialize and to be super valuable. You can even lead teams with this approach - as long as you're very cognizant of where your people are better at one specialty than you (i.e. your designer gets to make the tough calls, not you). When you straddle the lines, you're able to translate between experts and to make sure all of the little details are covered. Often, you are the reason that things stay together instead of splintering apart: the glue.

But if you really want to be able to call the shots and be the expert in an area, to lead the team and to be ultimately responsible for "X" - you need to be focused on it. You need to have the most clear understanding of the problems you're dealing with and the person who spends the most time working on and thinking about it. Your value comes from having a sharp and accurate point of view - the nail.

To those who say that you can be expert in both, the answer is that you're fooling yourself. The world that we live in is such that it's impossible to truly be an "expert" in anything. The best we can be is to be constantly learning through practice, education and discussion.

It's impossible to constantly be on top of code and expert in design at the same time because there's so much to learn about each area that splitting your time leaves you behind the truly focused individuals.