In that sense, Reed's team was like a startup: everyone had to be ultra-capable because they had to pick up anyone's slack at any time
It's important to note that in this sense, "polyglot" refers to the collective group -- ie, the Obama campaign had numerous talented people with a huge variety of skills in-house -- vs the individual sense of the word.
Not to say that there weren't incredibly talented generalists, but when you have a team of this size (dozens of designers and front-end developers, engineers focused on the back-end APIs, a team dedicated to data integration, a handful of dedicated ops and DBAs) the ability of individuals to specialize in an area could be a strength.
It's important to note that in this sense, "polyglot" refers to the collective group -- ie, the Obama campaign had numerous talented people with a huge variety of skills in-house -- vs the individual sense of the word.
Not to say that there weren't incredibly talented generalists, but when you have a team of this size (dozens of designers and front-end developers, engineers focused on the back-end APIs, a team dedicated to data integration, a handful of dedicated ops and DBAs) the ability of individuals to specialize in an area could be a strength.