Something that’s becoming clearer as the year goes on is how much of everyone’s job was quite rote. Every tool had a learning curve, and there was a lot of volume, including plenty of really easy work that could still fill someone’s day, so it made sense for people to stick to their own area and get to know it properly. The downside was that anything outside your area meant raising a ticket and waiting around, which was a pain on both sides. Now the expectation is that everyone can self-serve the easy half of each other’s work, and it’s great. The coordination tax was always real, and everyone’s feeling the difference.
What I’m finding, though, is that the easy half isn’t quite as easy as it looks. Everyone thinks they’re a designer until a real user gets stuck on their screen, and it’s the same with data, commercial and pretty much everything else. There’s a layer underneath every specialty, the sense of whether something actually holds up next to everything else you know, and without it you can end up with something that looks exactly like the real thing and turns out to be really just words once you poke at it a little.
That’s not really anyone’s fault, but the game has changed. Most of us only ever learnt our own area properly. Picking up other people’s areas used to happen by osmosis, and now it’s pretty much expected from day one. The good news is that the tools are a really good teacher (I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve asked Claude to explain something to me like I’m five), so mostly it comes down to whether you’re curious enough to keep asking.
I don’t think there’s really a comfortable middle any more. The easy half of one area used to be enough to fill a job, and now it’s where everyone starts. From there, great could mean going very deep into something narrow. Or it could mean becoming a better builder because you can now see far more of the system and connect dots that used to sit in other people’s heads. Both are perfectly valid, but either way the bar has moved a lot higher.