[meowface]

I've never founded or worked for a startup, but I would imagine that especially at the early stages, all your engineers will need to be pretty good generalists. You're (probably) going to need a website, a product frontend, a product backend, an infrastructure, etc... And if that work's being split between 3 - 8 people, most of them are going to have be generalists.

[theboss]

Maybe in 2004 but this is 2013. Rails, iOS, Digitalocean, heroku, aws, with a front-end designer. You no longer need to know anything about infrastructure.

[czbond]

Until you scale. I've met too many developers who say this until they're in a high growth environment.

[theboss]

My original point exactly. They get all these rails cloud heroku iOS guys and then how aren't the startups trapped? Ive never seen a job posting for an infrastructure all-around-guy

[czbond]

Fair. I've seen a lot of 'full stack' or 'back end' engineer postings - which i think is 'their version' of an infrastructure guy. If you think about it, how would a designer who has mainly pushed pixels describe that type of offering besides 'back end'?

[meowface]

>Ive never seen a job posting for an infrastructure all-around-guy

I've seen plenty of such job postings, though typically for big boring companies; not startups.

[czbond]

IMHO - By generalist - he also means closing customers, finding new clients, and crafting value props.