Vertical or Horizontal development

spud1955 writes: Programming a single tier or all tiers of an Enterprise system that is the question. I recently interviewed for a large software consulting company that does a lot of Enterprise development. The technical architect white boarded their typical development strategy. It ended up looking like the typical Presentation, Business, Data layers that we've all gotten used in enterprise development. I went to the interview with a long history of doing "backend" stuff in C++ and C#. When I asked where they envisioned I would fit in he told me they usually took logical vertical slices through the system and assigned them to a separate developer. As I've never done it this way before I was quite surprised. With today's GUI's being based on very sophisticated graphical systems I thought that creating a good front end that looked good and flowed well had become a bit of speciality. There are even significant differences between web GUI's and desktop GUI's. In a similar vein although anyone can create a database and write some SQL it takes a specialist to create a well structured database and efficent SQL especially with today's huge databases. I realise in smaller organisations you have to be a jack of all trades but in larger developments I see a great advantage in having specialists for the various layers but who also have knowledge of whats above and below them. Although I'm not defending IT recruiters my theory seems to be borne out with adverts that specify specific technologies like Winforms, WPF, PHP, SQL Server DBA. What do you think?