[theevocater]

I think that what they accomplished is amazing, but remember that their goals were very different than your typical business. Their goals were to create something in a short amount of time with a really random group of people given a fairly short lifetime. The individual projects will live on, but the whole thing was shut down at the end of the campaign.

A business is about sustainability. You are creating things that you will be maintaining and using for (hopefully) years to come. You get to be picky about who you are hiring. In that given, its not unusual that you want all of your employees to be able to work on various parts of the stack as focus changes or what not.

This isn't to discount the value in polyglot groups. Its almost an inevitability at this point. While totally possible that you could have entirely js stack in node, more likely you'll have ruby (or something) and javascript and maybe objc for iphone and java for android and maybe .Net for windows or more objc on osx or whatever.

[saraid216]

> In that given, its not unusual that you want all of your employees to be able to work on various parts of the stack as focus changes or what not.

Isn't it? I'm a frontend dev. While I'm capable of digging into the backend and mucking around, it's not a typical part of my job. There are backend devs who I can talk to, who are writing Scala or Java rather than Javascript or Ruby, who can deal with problems faster and better than I could.

Changes of focus like what you describe seem to be typical of far more nascent companies. In that sense, Reed's team was like a startup: everyone had to be ultra-capable because they had to pick up anyone's slack at any time, just like a CEO of a ten-man group sometimes has to clean the kitchen or code a component that no one else has time to.

[oasisbob]

In that sense, Reed's team was like a startup: everyone had to be ultra-capable because they had to pick up anyone's slack at any time

It's important to note that in this sense, "polyglot" refers to the collective group -- ie, the Obama campaign had numerous talented people with a huge variety of skills in-house -- vs the individual sense of the word.

Not to say that there weren't incredibly talented generalists, but when you have a team of this size (dozens of designers and front-end developers, engineers focused on the back-end APIs, a team dedicated to data integration, a handful of dedicated ops and DBAs) the ability of individuals to specialize in an area could be a strength.

[jordo37]

I think there is a difference in terms of having fullstack developers versus polyglot developers or a polyglot team. To me, and it seems like in this article, polyglot means using various comparable languages that operate at the same or overlapping parts of the stack - so not Ruby versus Node.js, but Ruby versus PHP.