Eitan Blumin lets me quote one of my favorite chapter headings from Adam Smith:
You see, in this past decade or so, we’ve all noticed a trend where more and more businesses are looking for DBAs who know a bit about everything: RDBMS, NoSQL, Key-Value databases, Cache Databases, Full-Text Search Databases, Vector Databases, and more. In response, more and more data professionals prefer to become multi-disciplinary, doing a bit of everything… Even if it means becoming a part-time Data Engineer / Data Analyst / Data Scientist / DevOps / whatever. Otherwise, they fear that they won’t be able to find enough job opportunities.
But, there’s a cost to that approach. Sometimes a very high cost.
Eitan argues in favor of an approach with part-time experts and full-time jacks-of-many-trades. For smaller companies, I completely agree: a software development company with 5 total employees usually can’t afford a full-time DBA or networking specialist or virtualization specialist, but they can still run into problems that an expert would easily be able to solve. But I think once you get past a couple dozen IT people at a company, there’s enough scope for some critical specialization. In other words, the market within a company grows (hush, people who are going to throw Ronald Coase at me for that statement—it’s metaphorical!) and allows for additional division of labor and specialization.
Anyhow, Eitan has some tips around determining whether you’d rather be a jack-of-all-trades or a master of something.