> I for one used to believe in a cross functional team. I used to believe that everyone in a team should be able to do every task in the team.
Learning some skill requires X hours. Maintaining that skill requires Y hours/year.
Those numbers vary both by task (webdev has quite a bit of churn, where server OSes tend to have decade-long support lifecycles) and by person (not everyone learns at the same speed, and sometimes people learn different kinds of things at different speeds).
A team where anyone can do anything can work or now work, depending on how hard the things they do are, how many different things there are, and who's on the team.
Learning some skill requires X hours. Maintaining that skill requires Y hours/year.
Those numbers vary both by task (webdev has quite a bit of churn, where server OSes tend to have decade-long support lifecycles) and by person (not everyone learns at the same speed, and sometimes people learn different kinds of things at different speeds).
A team where anyone can do anything can work or now work, depending on how hard the things they do are, how many different things there are, and who's on the team.