It’s not about specialization, though. It’s about getting those benefits from standard and existing tooling. You don’t need to be an expert in accessibility to build accessible software (though it helps of course). But you do need to build accessibility support, which is a lot more work when you do it from scratch.
The longer I work in the industry the more I realize the cost of “doing it from scratch”. If you ask a brand new software engineer to estimate the time for a project, they’ll basically give you an estimate for a prototype. A slightly more experienced engineer will include time to get through code review and maybe shake out the egregious bugs. A more advanced one will remember to cost for tests. I have found you have to get a pretty senior engineer if you want them to accurately account for things like telemetry and logging, deployment, live site management, accessibility, localization, etc.
I’ve seen engineers build a “simple” system and then spend 4x as long as they planned to make it actually supportable because they “didn’t need” the existing tooling. So they rewrote it all but worse.
The longer I work in the industry the more I realize the cost of “doing it from scratch”. If you ask a brand new software engineer to estimate the time for a project, they’ll basically give you an estimate for a prototype. A slightly more experienced engineer will include time to get through code review and maybe shake out the egregious bugs. A more advanced one will remember to cost for tests. I have found you have to get a pretty senior engineer if you want them to accurately account for things like telemetry and logging, deployment, live site management, accessibility, localization, etc.
I’ve seen engineers build a “simple” system and then spend 4x as long as they planned to make it actually supportable because they “didn’t need” the existing tooling. So they rewrote it all but worse.