outposts

The Last Generation of Generalists

For the last decade, the Web has become a place for generalists.  It has a tendency for specialists to be “corrupted” before too long into being generalists more or less, no matter how hard specialists try to remain so.  There are plenty of good aspects to this.  No one innovates like a first timer!  There’s nothing like beginners mind.  There are also some down sides that we, as an industry, may or may not be thinking though completely.

Today, we have web professionals who are “Front End Developers who also know some PHP and MySQL and some Photoshop and can do Flash as long as they don’t have to code in ActionScript 3.”  Or we find “Back End Developers who are also writing markup for some things and jump in and alter PNG files from time to time if the designer is taking too long to send the assets.”  At my company we are doing what we can to defend against that and let people dive deep in an “efficacy silo” as part of their job.  We have found that when we do that, rather than getting borded, they like it, become experts, and begin to work smarter rather than harder.

There was a time in the adolescent Web when the server side was becoming largely Java based and where it looked like we might have a chance to start to specialize.  Again in 1999 or so when CSS was finally at a critical mass in terms of adoption, I thought we might see our workflows beginning to silo, but that didn’t end up happening like it could have.

Did “platform assistant” technologies like Ruby on Rails help or harm?  There has certainly been a tendency at the platform level to make it easier for people to do complex things across application tiers.  But do we want that as an industry?  How sustainable is it to have the front end developers changing tables in the saved credit card database?  Don’t kid yourself, stuff like this happens all the time at levels you would cringe to hear.  The way I track it, this idea was pioneered by Microsoft with ASP and Visual Basic.  We know how their contributions have affected the Web at large since.  I think you could make a pretty strong case for going back in time and un-inventing Visual Basic.  Though without “DHTML” could we have HTML 5?  Maybe not.  Two steps forward, one step back.  That’s the Web, right?

Now, don’t let me give you the impression that I, myself, am not the most General Generalist there is.  I certainly am.  On a given day I’ll configure an Apache Web Server, edit a DNS record, code in JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Objective C, Java, Ruby, and yes, go fix the transparency on a PNG file if I can’t reach the designer in time.  I have pretty much kicked and screamed and resisted any kind of specialization all my life.  Which is probably one of the reasons I find specialization fascinating in the first place.  ”I want the one I can’t have” as Morrissey used to say.

It’s as shocking to me as anyone else, but I have recently come to believe that the Web needs to specialize in order to mature.  I believe the next generation of Web technology needs to do something new for the Web: create Job Descriptions.

Think of the Film and Television Industry (such as it is).  Try not to think about how screwed that industry is for a second and what Large Media Corporations do to content creation (there’s another important lesson for the web there, but that’s another topic). Just think about the Production process.  A TV set is a sea of specialization.  It has evolved that way.  I might say it has matured into that state, because it definitely wasn’t that way initially when the stunt person and the camera person might be the same person in the Silent Era.  But imagine trying to get a film made today in an industry of generalists.  You have an eighty million dollar budget and 300 people who can do all sorts of things, some of them better than others but hard to identify one from the other, some only begrudgingly decorate sets because what they really like is costuming but there are already too many people who like costuming on the set.  See where this is going?

I think it’s safe to assume that the Film and Television industry has evolved the way it has for very specific reasons and in response to pressure from real people on both sides of the camera and the screen.  Creating amazing content is a really complex and difficult job.  Doing it well and const effectively takes an intense amount of organization and specialized knowledge.  There are people who’s only job is to lay cables on a set. If you ask them to stand in front of a camera for a sec so you can check the light, they say “Hell no, that’s not my job.”  On the surface you might think, “How lazy!” But really, refusing to do things you aren’t qualified to do and aren’t good at, is pretty level headed.

The other really huge implication of specialization on the Web, is that we’ll be able to organize.  You might giggle when you think of Worker’s Rights on the web, but in ten years, it will be critical to have that kind of structure in place or we’re all going to be pawns for massive, deep pocketed, industry giants and we won’t be able to dictate much of anything if we are not organized.  Is a Front End Developer’s union such a crazy idea?  Should we really wait until we are financially obligated to organize?  How did that work out for Labor in the last century?

In my own career on the Web since 1996, have seen the fee-for-service rates go down, hourly interactive shop rates go down, and interactive budgets overall go down in all corners of the industry.  I have seen the Web, its core technologies, and the people who do the work, begin to be accepted as commodities.  If clients on the Web are moving out of the “industrial revolution” phase, shouldn’t we do that as well?

My hope is that we are, in fact, the Last Generation of Generalists on the Web.  Though I myself have loved being one.  I like the idea of a Future where I am the Charlie Chaplin better than one where the Web stays in the equivalent of the Silent Film Era in perpetuity.