Adam Smith vs. fullstack developers - and productivity in DevOps? By Adam Smith, labour division can make you by 240 times more effective (on example of a pin factory producing pins in 18 steps).

Why then are multi-skilled roles are so in demand if this actually reduces productivity - or was Smith just wrong, why then?

Searches for "fullstack developer" still trend on Google, however apparently slower than two years ago:

 

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To sum up, a full stack developer would be able do virtually all the value chain (correct me if I am wrong):


Discuss with customers and refine workable agile requirements for his part of the job
Decide which architecture, tooling and components pick up - just give him a notebook
Write code for frontend, backend, ingration, which is cross device compatile and does not requrire much testing, or includes it
Profile and scape data, use Cloud AI/ML APIs for advanced features
Write up required IaC code and rollout
Be on call in case of error or sales processes
Be aware of security relevant design, overall patching, migration and modernization
Account time table in a scroutinized way to ease invoicing of the employer
... did I forget anything?


UPD - "we need the productivity of specialisation but we don’t want the insular worldview of “extreme division of labour”. (DevOps Guys, "DevOps, Adam Smith and the legend of the Generalist", 2013-2016)
There are two types of work:


Exploitation - Well defined work that can be easily divided into well-defined stages, where each stage can be learned and mastered on its own and handover between stages does not require communication.
Exploration - Undefined work, which requires learning and experimentation to accomplish each stage and handover between stages requires massive amounts of communication of all learning and status of the project. 


Adam Smith concerns himself wholly with exploitation and not at all with exploration. The work done in Research &amp; Development departments of the industry is by its definition mostly exploration and so it is not covered in any way by Adam Smith.

But we have seen that in later continuous improvement stages, which are partly exploitative work, the application of CI/CD can bring similar gains in productivity, which could in some way be probably traced down to Adam Smith by someone very imaginative.