Jack of all trades / Master of one. Which is better?

The web is continuously evolving at a break necking speed, and web design is even more so. Just 15 to 20 years ago, Jack Ma of Alibaba said that the first version of his website took 3 hours to load on a computer and it was just a single page static website. Compare that to the situation now, the technology has advanced so much more.

Today, HTML5 and CSS3 are the basics of web design, while new things appear everyday. The buzzwords, just a while ago, mobile-responsive, UI/UX design and WordPress are already the “must knows” of today. The skill sets are also getting more and more specified. Exactly what kind of developer are you? Frontend, backend, full stack, iOS, Android, web or something else? Job titles in the web industry are becoming more and more specific but the expected skills are ever increasing.

So what does a web developer exactly need to know?

Coding, design, sales, marketing, etc, the list goes on. Can one person be an expert in all of these? Probably not.

But great results definitely require all these meaning that a team will be needed. But it isn’t as simple as “learn to design” or “learn to code”, perhaps it is “learn to communicate and collaborate”. This is become no one wants to give up on their own discipline that they love so much, yet they need to understand each other’s discipline to work well. It is no longer about what you know, but all about what the clients want and what the clients are using. Only through collaboration then can web developers and designers achieve what is required.

Long story short, you do not need to know everything,

but you need to know something about each other’s discipline in order to produce great results that your clients need. In order to understand each other’s field, you need to first respect each other’s expertise because in this increasing specialized yet interconnected world, you need to be an expert in your field and know enough to communicate with your teammates.

So once you scratch the surface of each other’s expertise, you will realize that it is not the technical details that is important, but rather the mindsets you need to have. Developers should join designers in design meetings and designers should join developers in technical meetings.

It is easy to be overwhelmed, make no mistake, it is hard to collaborate. But this is the most important skill needed in today’s web development world.