Even Apple doesn't do it that way. Like many things Steve Jobs said, it contradicts what he did. The things we say about ourselves espouse ideals and far-mode thinking to enrich our status and legacy. But the brass tacks of what we actually do is still boring, controlling, manipulative, micromanagerial, and petty.

I've never encountered any company, nor heard of one, that enacts the advice of that Jobs quote.

In fact, I've recently been taking a deep dive into some organizational management literature to try to better understand where these absolutely ass backwards ideas of "cross functional" and "full stack" teams came from, and why they are so bundled together with open-plan offices.

I found an interesting paper [0] that seems to serve as somewhat of a basis paper in this area, and which makes bald and unsupported claims about the superiority of what are called "process complete teams" (this, as far as my research has yielded so far, seems to be the prototerm that led to "full stack" and "cross functional").

The entire idea of this management philosophy is that you exactly should hire smart people then tell them what to do. The advice is basically to take generically smart people and then re-train them to have a generalist skill set as it relates to your business, so that every person can do every task, from talking to the customer to filling out the right paperwork to actually writing the code (whether it is front end, back end, whatever) and walking through all of the steps from start to finish.

The paper advocates having a small number of job titles in an organization, each of which has many employees with that title, and to create teams and positions with enormous overlap in terms of their skill set and responsibility set.

The paper makes all sorts of weakly supported (or entirely unsupported) claims that organizing by specialization (what they call "functional" units) is bad, and spends time talking about how to "break" specialist employees form their mindset that their specialization matters and instill into them a cross-functional "sense of responsibility" for the entire possible pipeline of work.

This is where the ties to open-plan seating arrangements come from. It is argued that open-plan, community seating creates a communal sense of responsibility for the entire pipeline of work, whereas even changing to an organizational structure that is "cross functional" or "full stack" is not enough whenever employees are allowed to have privacy while doing their work -- their privacy, so it is argued, and private work habits prevent you from successfully "breaking" their mindset that they are a specialist focusing on their special subset of tasks. Eerily similar to both military indoctrination and prison inmate indoctrination...

It's very easy to see how this mid 1990s organization literature has created the bizarre dysfunction of modern "cross-functional" teams and "full stack" developers, leading to Agile/Scrum bullshit, pan-everything job ads with a million bullet points, the treatment of specialized workers as undifferentiated cogs, and the flagrant hostility on the part of the modern HR apparatus towards employees whose sense of pride in their personal specialty (something they had to protect in order to have a resume that would have gotten them hired in the first place) leads them to protect themselves by demanding an employer provide relevant work resulting in HR labeling them as "not a team player" or some other buzzword meant to "break" them (isn't it insane that a professional management article is using language like "breaking" an employee, like this is boot camp or something??).

Anyway, while I love indulging in some good far-mode thinking about the peachy world where companies actually hired specialists and did the real work of managing them (instead of the lazy "throw it all in a cross-functional bucket" non-management they do now), it's just not the world we live in.

[0] "Breaking the Functional Mind-Set in Process Organizations" Ann Majchrzak and Qianwei Wang. Harvard Business Review, Sep/Oct Issue 1996. < http://business.unr.edu/faculty/Kuechler/788/breaking%20the%... >