Half the advice says "become the person who owns X end to end." The other half says "stay adaptable, the stack you specialize in might be dead in five years."
Still early-ish and I genuinely can't tell if I'm building a moat or spreading myself into mush. What actually paid off for you, looking back?
Slightly different take — early on, breadth is how you discover what you'd want to go deep on. You can't specialize in something you've never touched. Sample widely for a couple years, notice what you keep coming back to, then go deep on that. The depth question gets easier once you have data on yourself.
The framing that helped me: go deep enough on one thing to know what "good" actually looks like, then breadth gets cheap because you can pattern-match everything against it. Specializing didn't lock me in — it gave me a reference point. T-shaped. You're not choosing forever, just choosing next.
