The Kitchen Sink Engineer
When I started in the mid-90s, a software engineer wrote software. That was the job. There were specialists for databases, networks, security, operations. We stayed in our lanes. The lanes were narrow and well-paved.
That world is gone.
This isn't about startups, where everyone wears many hats because they have to. That's survival mode, and it comes with the territory. This is about the industry's steady march toward lumping ever more technical responsibility into the engineering bucket—usually without adjusting expectations for deliverables, and rarely with room to develop the skills now demanded. It's less evolution than decree—or plain laziness. Shovel responsibility in, skip the support, move on.
"Full-stack" was the first crack—front-end and back-end, please. Then came DevOps: you build it, you run it. Then "shift left"—security is your problem now. Testing. Observability. Infrastructure as code. The specialists didn't disappear, but their domains got dumped onto everyone else's plate anyway.
The industry calls this "T-shaped skills"—deep expertise in one area, broad competence across many. Except the T keeps getting wider. First it was T-shaped. Then Pi-shaped (two deep areas). Now I see "M-shaped" in job postings, which is just admitting we want three or more specialists glued together under one trench coat.
I've always leaned toward breadth over depth—more top-of-T than stem. But there's such a thing as too wide. As the top expands, the legs inevitably shrink. Yet companies want M-shaped candidates from fresh grads. It takes me two years of daily work to feel fluent in a new programming language. I see junior resumes listing more technologies than I'd put on mine. Touching isn't knowing. But the JDs don't care—they need kitchen sinks, so everyone claims to be one.
A recent security industry analysis put it bluntly: "Developers were never security subject matter experts. They never asked to be. Yet today, they're responsible for early-stage security testing, vulnerability remediation, policy compliance, and their core coding work, all simultaneously."
I remember one job where the SRE team—specialists in the ops field—declared YBIYRI and suddenly I was on call one out of every three weekends, never more than five minutes from a computer. I had two young children. When I pushed back, the twenty-something who made the decision shrugged: "It's no big deal. You can just spend those weekends binge-watching Netflix." The decree assumed a life I didn't have.
"Hybrid" is what the industry calls us now. I prefer "kitchen sink."
Agents were supposed to help. I'll admit: I feared agentic dev at first. I thought it would take away the one thing I loved about software—programming. Turns out what I love is building things. Programming was a first love. Building was the reason why, I just didn't know it. Agents let me prototype in half an hour what used to take a week. That immediate gratification is real.
And agents do help with the T-shaped burden. They fill gaps. They shore up weak skills. The broadening feels less daunting when you have a collaborator who's read every tutorial you haven't.
But building faster doesn't mean shipping faster. Everyone's a builder now—agents unlocked that power. Great. But prototyping isn't operationalizing. A PM isn't going to hand the reins to an agent and expect it to nail the AWS architecture on the first try, or get the security properties right for a SaaS product they've never seen. An agent isn't replacing humans for customer interviews or requirements gathering. Not yet.
Deep specialties still matter. They just might change—based on what agents absorb versus what still needs a human in the loop. Agents amplify experts. They don't wholesale replace them.
The real irony? Agents filling gaps will probably just raise expectations further. If the tools help everyone do more, then more becomes the baseline. The lanes don't come back. They just homogenize into highway. Engineers do PM work. PMs do engineer work. Everyone does a little of everything, and the sink gets larger.
You still need to know Terraform and OWASP and how to read a flame graph and why the CI is red. You just also need to know how to wrangle an alligator now.
Welcome to the kitchen.*
*Professional kitchens are models of role clarity. The metaphor collapses under inspection. I liked the line.