No one with an ounce of self-worth should work long-term for companies that expect them to do exactly what their title implies they should and not a thing more.

You're basically being arbitrarily restricted to learning and enjoying exactly one thing when it would often make more sense in context to become involved in: Customer relations, systems administration, management, software engineering, data science, etc.

Sure, you'll become really good at that one thing, but it'll be at the cost of personal growth and job satisfaction.

> I'm probably gonna get a lot of sh!t for this post...

I mean, yeah. You've basically lampooned anybody who enjoys working in ill-defined cross-disciplinary circumstances as having "[not an] ounce of self-worth".

It sounds like, from your perspective, your field is "the important stuff" and other fields are just balls to be juggled. There's nothing wrong with that, but lots of people don't think that way. To some people, the important stuff is anything that makes their customers happy. To others, it's anything that helps them learn.

And let's dispense with the notion that "doing 3 jobs for the price of one" is an accurate description of having broad rather than narrow responsibilities. One comes at the cost of the other. If you're an equally capable specialist and generalist, and you're capable of genuinely performing those 3 jobs at once, then if you were to specialize you'd be performing the work of 3 average specialists, and you'd be in the same boat as before.

Do what you're best at and try to get the best possible compensation for it, monetary or experiential. It's as simple as that.

> And in all honesty, no data scientist with an ounce of self-worth should work long-term for such companies, unless it just happens to be their own.

You're kind of saying that no one should work for a startup ever. At small companies you have to do many things. As you said a software engineer, there aren't dedicated front-end engineers or dev-ops. Marketing teams don't have content vs. growth vs. performance vs. brand vs. email marketers. You might be the first sales person, which means no sales ops support, no account manager for ongoing relationships, etc.

There are trade-offs, of course! There are trade-offs to anything. Some people value working on many aspects of a company. Some people find understanding more than their narrow field to be interesting and rewarding and, you know, self-worth-y!

So I think it might be helpful to step back and consider that not everyone has the same priorities, experiences, interests, or definitions of happiness and self-worth as you do. And that's okay.

>You get to focus on the important stuff, instead of juggling ten balls at the same time.

So on one hand, you can't build any models without the work of the engineers, but on the other the model building is "the important stuff"?

Maybe it's just me, but I enjoy working on all aspects of the data pipeline.

Model building is often the trivial part, and often you can't build models without a solid understanding of things like the data pipeline.

Some people enjoy doing full stack DS and get paid well for it.

And there's the potential risk of being mediocre on many fields and become less competitive in each area. My opinion is it really needs to be the field you love (biology, science etc) to be worth the effort.

to be fair, how large should a field be?

specializing in physics as a whole is way to broad. but is specializing in front end software development to broad?

Once you have learned the fundementals of computer science and its assosicated fields (networking and systems engineering mainly), the difference between doing back/front end works is not that large.

I had two semesters of databases at university. I wonder why they wasted so much time. I mean, you don't really need university education to understand the SELECT statement, right? /s

The problem with computer science is that it may take a lot of time to understand something thoroughly, but it only takes a while to find a tutorial, copy some example code from web, and build a simple version that only contains a few bugs and will be a nightmare to maintain and scale, but hey, it mostly works, as long as you use it in the predicted way and don't put in too much data and don't type or click too fast.

And because this works most of the time, and can be sold, this became the standard. People only capable of copy-paste development still get jobs. Design patterns, that's just some academic nonsense for nerds, right? Hey, my teenage nephew made a simple application in PHP over the weekend; how much more difficult can your job be, seriously? Java and JavaScript are the same thing, aren't they? Okay, one of them has optional semicolons, but now you are making a mountain out of a molehill, just admit it. What database design? Just make some tables and put the data there; if it's not fast enough, add some indexes. Web page design? Just put the button on the top; if it doesn't fit, put it on the bottom; if it still doesn't fit, put it on the side or maybe in the header, whatever. What's all this talk about technical debt? I am paying you to add new features...

Yes, software developers who don't have deep knowledge in any field, and who do mediocre work, are quite interchangeable. No need to invent specialized job positions for them. If your company develops 10 products, all the wheels will be reinvented 10 times and most of them won't rotate properly, but that's life. The advantage is that replaceable people are cheaper and more obedient.

I mostly agree but the competition in the field will dictate that. Like you stated if it's features you are after and the sold party won't mind these small details then maybe they (developers) are interchangeable. But e.g in science mediocre work will cost a lot if certain minor details are found wrong. That's whole reproducibility crisis in science is about. The reputation of a whole institute / department might be at risk if the mistakes are exposed.