Stone says deep narrow specialization is becoming less valuable at Netflix; the org increasingly favors generalists and adaptable talent who can range across engineering layers or functions. ✦ AI generated
Elizabeth Stone · Lenny's Podcast · 2026-07-19 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 23:07
“What are you finding is trending down? What are you less looking for that used to value more highly?”
But as a general rule, compared to 5 or 10 years ago, I would believe we have fewer specialists and more people who are generalists or adaptable in multiple directions. And that could be adaptable across functional expertise. It could be adaptable across flavors of engineering. So, can I navigate both back end and front end systems? Can I hook into infrastructure with a lot of expertise?
verbatim transcript · starts at 23:07
23:07have fewer specialists and more people who are generalists or adaptable in multiple directions. And that could be adaptable across functional expertise. It could be adaptable across flavors of engineering. So, can I navigate both back end and front end systems? Can I hook into infrastructure with a lot of expertise? I think the the mindset now needs to be I can learn that quickly, and that goes back to the systems thinking. So, I think
23:35specialists can learn to have a broader array of tools more easily than was true in the past. So, it we need fewer of them perhaps because talent's able to grow in that direction. And there's something about sticking to a narrow specialty that maybe triggers for me a concern about what about the mindset of growing in different directions and exploring boring, and I don't want to be too narrow even in my own assessment of
24:03that, but I it's important that people who are specialists still have that sense of I want to try a new way of solving these problems versus the way we have in the past. >> And when you say specialist, are you thinking like front end, I'm a front end engineer versus a back end, or are there other >> Yeah, or it could be a domain set of knowledge of Yeah, I'm a deep
24:22>> expert. >> I'm a payments expert. I'm an ads marketplace design expert. I'm an an expert in this very specific tooling that studio productions use. >> Mhm. >> So, there specialist in subject matter expertise is an advantage provided that person is willing to grow and extend into is this really still the right tool or the right way to think about the problem? So, I think it's the layers of the stack from
24:52an engineering perspective that there's less specialty. And then tools that are unlikely to be static or like to have a lot of inertia around them. I would think like we would want people who are able to innovate and imagine like what's the future version of this? And so we want more talent like that. >> Awesome. So coming back to the systems thinking piece, people hearing this are