People tend to see that a specialist is an expert in one field. In tech, people separate specialists to a Backend, Frontend, Devops, and such. But to my opinion, they’re a micro-specialist. That’s too narrow to be called as a specialist.

My definition of specialist is broader in this aspect: a specialist is someone expert in their field, we should get out from the ‘tech bubble’ and start to see ‘fields’ as more ‘broader fields’, the ‘tech’ is one of that field.

So a tech specialist is someone expert in tech field. The tech field containing a lot of sub-fields what we called Backend, Frontend, Devops, and such. With this view, we can see if we are an expert in tech, we should mainly at least knew about all these sub-fields, a fractional of Backend, Frontend, Devops, and such. Thus a Fullstack developer is actually a specialist in tech.

The problem from the previous point of view, when we want to be a Generalist, we tend to pursue ourself as a Full-Stack. In reality, we still can’t keep up with business view of Generalist. In business perspective, they see us as a Specialist, but in Tech. This business perspective would open your view about Specialist and Generalist.

Sticking to previous definition, we would limit ourself to learn only about Full-Stack, at the same time we exaggerated about our Generalist stand. When we talk to a company (or business person), we would say like, “I’m a generalist, I can do most of the things—”, but business person would see it as, “Okay, can you design our website?”—or something like, “Okay, it means you can do social media right?”

Before the bubble burst out in front of our face, we should face that someone who only knew either Backend, Frontend, or Devops are micro-specialist. To be a true specialist means understanding the broader point of view, thus it let us rebirth as a ‘Product’ Engineer who see Engineering/Tech in Business perspective too. This allow you to see other fields as important aspects in Tech Product and make us be respectful to others and admit our True Specialist in Tech.