Fortune_Hunter - 6:59 pm on Jul 10, 2008 (gmt 0)

Neil McAllister over at InfoWorld just released an article discussing the potential skills crisis in web development. His point is that with so many possible skills and technologies available that developers are being driven to specialize because there is no way to keep up if you are just a generalists. Here is the article...

[weblog.infoworld.com...]

I am not sure I agree for a few reasons, first how do you choose what to specialize in? Second, after you make a choice what do you do when/if that specialization is no longer wanted or needed by the market? Seems like an expensive and time consuming activity to keep re-specializing in stuff all the time.

I believe it is much better to be a generalists with maybe a few areas you know better than others and the ability to find a person that is a specialists if you must absolutely have that technology.

His other point is that with so many ways of doing some of the same activities that the world of web development is ripe for consolidation and that the wild west days are over. I doubt that very much.

New technologies will come and go and what the web is or will be is still very much changing. We all have certain standards we stick to in development so we can actually get something done, but I doubt if the innovation and changes that make this a wild west landscape at times is going away anytime soon.

What say you?