My curiosity, over these last 10 years, has led me to explore first frontend, then wanting to understand how my frontend gets the information led me to backend, and eventually into data and devops as a natural addon.
I kept doing this, but it didn’t feel like a strength.
For a long time I felt that maybe I was wrong for doing that.
Everyone around me was specializing. The frontend people got really good at frontend. The backend people got really good at backend. And I kept bouncing between layers, picking things up, never going as deep as the specialists.
But then I started seeing that holding the whole surface in my head was actually a good thing. I could look at a bug in the UI and trace it back to a data model, hear a product requirement and immediately see the engineering cost.
To me, that’s what a product engineer is. Not someone who does everything but someone who understands enough of the full surface to make decisions that connect the layers. To sit in a product conversation and know what’s technically expensive. To look at a data model and know how it’ll feel in the UI three months from now.
I’m not saying specialization is bad. I’m glad my accountant knows tax law and my skydiving instructor knows how to land. But for the kind of work I do, building products end-to-end in (relatively) small teams, the generalist instinct helps a lot on the job.