Facebook | The Full Stack, Part I Great blog post. Quote: "… People who develop broad skills also tend to develop a good mental model of how different layers of a system behave. This turns out to be especially valuable for performance & optimization work. No one can know everything about everything, but you should be able to visualize what happens up and down the stack as an application does its thing. An application is shaped by the requirements of its data, and performance is shaped by how quickly hardware can throw data around." (categories: performancefacebookengineeringdataeducation )