> If you're a "pure coder" who doesn't have any of the other skills you mentioned, your output is incredibly limited. At best, you produce a day's worth of code in a day, but you also require someone to manage you closely to make sure you code the right stuff.
This seems to miss the point of teams. Everyone should have a role if you hire someone as a software engineer and they spend all their time doing devops because they like it more you've made a bad hire. If all your engineers are having product meetings with various departments then you've again made bad hires. Everyone should have their role and fullfill that role to work as a successful team. People thinking they're above fullfilling the role they were hired for is one of the fast ways to have a poor performant team. To put this into sports you don't want your defender to be constantly hanging around the other team's goal mouth.
And yet, there's incentive for somebody (say, in soccer) to try and score a goal even tho it's not their role - because scoring a goal is rewarded to the individual.
Individual coders/contributors' compensation don't scale until they are shown to "score a goal". And yet, to do so, they may have to stop contributing in their usual, assigned role, but go "above and beyond" - such as redesigning the system, or to make their mark on the product and be recognized as such.
This, i find, is probably what the fundamental problem/friction with teams are.
I can appreciate how this kind of specialization helps a team to scale. At the same time, what I like least about my current job is how structured my role is. ‘Draw within the lines’ is constraining and can push creative folks away.
This seems to miss the point of teams. Everyone should have a role if you hire someone as a software engineer and they spend all their time doing devops because they like it more you've made a bad hire. If all your engineers are having product meetings with various departments then you've again made bad hires. Everyone should have their role and fullfill that role to work as a successful team. People thinking they're above fullfilling the role they were hired for is one of the fast ways to have a poor performant team. To put this into sports you don't want your defender to be constantly hanging around the other team's goal mouth.