"The critical distinction between a craftsman and an expert is what happens after a sufficient level of expertise has been achieved. The expert will do everything she can to remain wedded to a single context, narrowing the scope of her learning, her practice, and her projects. The craftsman has the courage and humility to set aside her expertise and pick up an unfamiliar technology or learn a new domain." - Dave Hoover

Experts learn more and more about less and less.

This makes them useless.

@Root I respectfully disagree with your conclusion. Even if the expert learns exponentially less over time, that detracts not one but from the expertise already gained.

@monkeyboy True, except you lose knowledge over time, and times change, rendering their knowledge and expertise of ever-diminishing value. Eventually they will know everything about nothing at all.

Specializing is great, but be sure to keep up on everything you can lest you become outmoded.

By contrast, knowing a decent amount about a wide variety of things allows you to be useful in many fields, and apply knowledge between them as well. It is therefore much more useful to be well-rounded. A swiss army knife has many more applications and use than a scalpel, even if it truly excels at nothing.

You may suddenly notice that you are a back-end dev whom only job is to maintain legacy code

@Root but you can't use a Swiss Army knife to precision cut a block of steel.

It depends a lot on context, I'd agree for stuff like application or web dev but if you need something like rocket propulsion or power grid design or computer architecture you can't leave that to a generalist.

Perhaps the takeaway here is that some roles are best filled by experts and other roles are not. (And, that this should not surprise us)

@Root it also makes them... use... less... Whahahahahah

Hahha...

Why is no one else laughing...
Learning less?
Using less?
Being useless?

I'll show myself out...