[HN Gopher] The Undercover Generalist
___________________________________________________________________
The Undercover Generalist
Author : wofo
Score : 174 points
Date : 2024-02-01 08:21 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (ochagavia.nl)
(TXT) w3m dump (ochagavia.nl)
| melvinroest wrote:
| This article might be life changing for me. This is exactly what
| I needed to hear and couldn't put my finger on myself. He seems
| Dutch (.nl domain), and this is definitely a thing in NL. I
| wonder if it is from a Dutch perspective, because it is a bit of
| a caveat as I feel that the US seems to have tech companies that
| value generalists a bit more.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Nah, I feel like this is a thing everywhere. At least in Japan
| I see exactly the same thing.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| and has been for many years - my experience goes back to
| 1980.
|
| But I think that this would have been true ever since there
| were skilled trades in antiquity.
| wofo wrote:
| I hope it's life changing for the better! I live in Amsterdam,
| so feel free to shoot me an email if you want to meet
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| The same applies to regular jobs. Most job ads have a bullet list
| of requirements. There is some flexibility but when I was
| interested in a Ruby job as a C# developer I had a real hard time
| and didn't get any offers although I got close. Same for Haskell
| but there was only one company hiring for that ever in my city.
| And that is not taking into account the pay hit. Which is a
| luxury for the unmortgaged/kidless or both.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| This is true for all hiring of experienced people.
|
| If a company is after an experienced person then they want
| someone who can come up to speed with their codebase quickly.
| This means they do not want to spend time training someone in the
| languages and preferably the frameworks used.
|
| Yes for a permanent position they will also try to get people who
| can do other things and in a year or two's time the person will
| probably not be doing the same job.
|
| For a contractor you mist know the languages immediately, they
| need the person to cover a gap in their knowledge or resourses
| immediately. You won't be expected to know their codebase but
| would be expected to answer a question on the language or common
| library in the first few days to help a coworker debug an issue.
| In many cases you will not be there long enough to learn their
| codebase.
|
| If you are a contractor then you learn on your own time - the
| company will not pay you to learn new things, well at least until
| you have shown you are above average in doing things then they
| might allow this as they know they will get a payback.
|
| Basically you can't tell during a hiring process how good someone
| is (you can find out if they are bad) and so the company will
| look at how well you have done after some time and make a view as
| to wether it is worth spending resources to get you to do
| something different.
|
| Unfortunately many companies have this attitude to permeant
| employees and don't give enough time for training etc.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| One thing that is not generally considered is that while it's
| quick to switch language, it's not true for ecosystems.
|
| Yes, you can be productive in python syntax quickly, but I've
| seen enought people failing at building a sane python project I
| know that other things take more time: libs, tooling, workflow,
| typical error, debugging, deployment strats, etc.
|
| So you do want at least one specialist in the team to drive the
| generalists.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| > If a company is after an experienced person then they want
| someone who can come up to speed with their codebase quickly.
| This means they do not want to spend time training someone in
| the languages and preferably the frameworks used.
|
| I think there's more to it than this - companies want new hires
| to approximately align on culture things. If I'm a Go shop I
| don't want someone to endlessly whine about how Rust or Elixir
| or whatever is better and vice versa
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| I like the formula of "I am an expert <ONE programming language>
| developer with a focus on <ONE specialization> and <ONE business
| or development model>." Let me try it on for size:
|
| I am an expert Python developer with a focus on Azure-based cloud
| solutions and enterprise development in highly regulated
| industries.
|
| Sounds about right, even though I've never worked at a place
| where all 3 aspects were in full force. It stings a bit to shave
| off the other hundred or so things I can do, but that's marketing
| for you!
| pasc1878 wrote:
| That is simply emphasising your skills to meet the customers
| requirements.
|
| If the company used Amazon rather than Azure you would change
| your main message to show that.
|
| Any company should also read the rest of your skills and
| showing say experience of other cloud solutions would be a nice
| to have but not a requirement.
|
| Your CV will change for each application you make to emphasis
| the correct things.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I think up to a point being a specialist enables being a
| generalist. If you deep dive into the workings of programming
| languages, you gain valuable knowledge you can apply elsewhere
| (in other languages or even outside of them). I always ask myself
| how much of ones experience with some technology is transferable
| knowledge. In programming languages that are conceptually poor,
| there will be less transferable knowledge, than in programming
| languages, that introduce many profound concepts. Of course there
| is also a certain kind of knowledge to lower level languages. But
| it might not transfer well to higher level languages and their
| abstractions. Though one might understand how those are
| implemented, which is also good to know.
| CM30 wrote:
| It's probably also worth noting that most job ads are not 100%
| honest with the requirements for the role, and often feel more
| like a wishlist for the 'ideal' candidate rather than a set of
| concrete requirements. Heck, I've had at least a few companies
| and recruiters come back after I said I didn't feel I was right
| for the role due to not having [particular skill/language listed
| in the description] and say that it wasn't actually necessary
| after all.
|
| Well, at least that's often the case for permanent roles. For
| contractor ones it's likely a lot more about finding the person
| who can fix their problem immediately, and hence the requirements
| would be more accurate.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| I agree in general but don't fully trust recruiters who say you
| should go ahead anyway - it will depend on your previous
| experience with that recruiter.
| CM30 wrote:
| This is a very fair point. The recruiter and the company
| they're working with don't always have the same incentives,
| so it's entirely possible the former will put forward
| candidates that don't meet the requirements just to fill
| their quota too.
|
| Add this to how the work actually being done in a company
| often has very little to do with the interview or application
| process, and well, it's no wonder applying for them is such a
| crapshoot now.
| mamonster wrote:
| In Switzerland it's very common that if a hedge fund /
| financial company wants to hire a specific person from
| abroad(so he would need a permit) then they post a job ad that
| basically uniquely identifies that person's skillset, post it
| on glassdoor or jobs.ch or other, and then either get no
| response or filter people who think this is an actual opening.
|
| They then go to the immigration authority and say "Look, we
| cannot fill this position on the local market, we need to look
| abroad" and then miraculously just the right candidate shows
| up.
|
| Not sure how frequent it is in other countries, but if you see
| a ridiculous/incoherent job ad from a smaller company, it might
| be for a job that's already filled.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| This also happens every time an organisation wants to promote
| someone but some rule or regulation forces them to advertise
| the role externally. Copy-pasting directly from the
| candidate's CV into the job listing.
| cafard wrote:
| Many years ago, I saw in the Washington Post help-wanted
| section an advertisement for somebody with a master's degree
| and fluent in Chinese, for wages that were about secretarial
| level. Much later I understood that this was work-visa stuff
| --hey, we can't hire locally for our needs!
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| My public administration clients do exactly that with my
| profile: they want to hire me but must pretend they consider
| competition, so they publish my resume as a requirement.
| ghaff wrote:
| I had a position created for me once because basically
| someone (very) higher-up I knew wanted to hire me. I'm a
| little sorry I never looked for the job description that in
| retrospect I imagine was posted. I suspect it had some
| requirements or strongly preferred prereqs that very few
| people would have met.
| 98codes wrote:
| That's super common in the US and not just for hedge funds,
| it's practically everywhere.
| tivert wrote:
| > Not sure how frequent it is in other countries, but if you
| see a ridiculous/incoherent job ad from a smaller company, it
| might be for a job that's already filled.
|
| That's a required step in the US for converting a worker from
| a temporary(ish) work visa (H1-B) to a permanent residency
| visa (green card). They have to prove they can't fill the
| position with an American.
|
| Which is stupid and terrible system. By the time that step is
| reached, the immigrant employee has probably been settled in
| the US for 5+ years. It would be a giant injustice if anyone
| gets hired for those job postings, because that would fuck
| over the immigrant employee, so the candidates have no
| chance.
| fudged71 wrote:
| This is an interesting problem.
|
| Our company is outputting specific role responsibilities based
| on process mapping and resource sizing. And we are looking into
| using AI to write job descriptions. But is it ultimately going
| to be a recruiting problem if we show the exact breakdown of a
| role on a job description? How does that differ from role to
| role?
| rabee3 wrote:
| An eye opener honestly, I have to admit that I constantly thought
| that generalist path is more attractive, specially for non-tech
| companies, but I might need to change the approach after reading
| this.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Depends if you are after full-time or contract work.
| throwaway4233 wrote:
| Based on my experience the generalist path works out well when
| startups have enough capital to make a slightly risky hire. In
| the current job market, specialists in a specific language or
| framework is more sought after so that the hiring is risk free.
|
| It really depends on who(or what) is screening your resume. If
| it's someone with several years of techinical experience, they
| might consider the resume based on your generalist work. If
| it's a junior engineer or someone on HR side, they would just
| reject purely based on keywords on the resume.
|
| I was once rejected for a python role because the last time I
| pushed code in python to production was 2 years ago.
| whstl wrote:
| Yeah, that's my experience as well.
|
| Inexperienced developers but also inexperienced PMs have
| become extremely biased against generalists, due to
| assumptions and tendency to box others. This is a recent
| phenomena, it didn't used to be like this. A CTO, engineering
| director or senior knows better.
|
| Fixing HR is easy, though: just explain it to them what a
| generalist is and the advantages, and they'll trust you.
| eloisant wrote:
| Small companies like generalists because they have only a few
| engineers who have to do everything.
|
| Big companies like specialists because they have enough
| engineers to divide the work and have each one work on one
| specific aspect only.
| JR1427 wrote:
| I consider myself a generalist (not just professionally, but also
| in my other diverse interests).
|
| I have a Life Science background (PhD and post-doc), and now work
| as a dev writing data vis toolkits in JS/TS.
|
| I thought people would be clamouring for a scientist who is also
| a developer, but it turns out they really are not! They want one
| thing, or the other.
| JR1427 wrote:
| p.s. if you do want a life scientist who is also a dev, let me
| know! https://www.jake-reich.co.uk/cv
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| People do want scientists who are also devs, but mostly in
| healthcare related software businesses and data engineering for
| AI/ML. If you're applying to general "dev" jobs the background
| won't mean much.
| JR1427 wrote:
| I wasn't thinking of general dev jobs. In fact, when I moved
| from science to dev, a friendly manager I knew recommended
| that I take all my previous career stuff off my CV unless it
| was directly software-related.
|
| In my experience applying for jobs a couple of years ago,
| pharma and health-tech companies around where I live were not
| interested in my background. I was rejected by a couple of
| places allegedly because I didn't have a CS degree, and in
| one case because I didn't have a bioinformatics degree.
|
| (Obviously, the truth behind such feedback is questionable)
| pvdoom wrote:
| I think people very often don't know what they want, and at
| least for data science there is this weird thinking that exists
| that you are either a data scientist or a developer. When in
| reality the good data scientists also have good dev skills.
| JR1427 wrote:
| yes, I also applied for a couple of data science jobs, but
| that field didn't seem promising so I gave up quickly.
| dhruvmittal wrote:
| I similarly got a whole data science MS (paid for my by
| employer) but still remain at my developer job. Sort of a
| combination of the data science field looking a lot less
| promising than 3-4 years ago when I started the degree &
| more upward mobility if I don't change fields now.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Some computing seems like a foundational skill nowadays, for
| any science or technology related field. How are you going to
| do data analysis if you can't slap together some Python or R or
| something, right?
|
| I wonder if it is really hard for recruiters and HR people to
| separate out people like you, from somebody who only has seen
| programming in a very limited fashion.
|
| Lawyers don't get extra points for not being illiterate, right?
| spacebacon wrote:
| I think this may be a sign you are ready for a higher executive
| or director position but like many of us simply enjoy doing the
| work still. I faced a similar existential crisis as a generalist
| that ultimately led me to realizing I am an innovation strategist
| before a designer, engineer, or solutions architect. When a
| generalist crosses many silos with specialized knowledge and
| expertise in each the smart move in my opinion is to lean into it
| with a better defined role. Business consultant, solutions
| architect, innovation strategist, CTO and so on...
| Xeamek wrote:
| I don't necessarily disagree, in fact I think Your point is
| quite salient. I do however think it is somewhat a pity that
| this sort of 'innovation strategist' is thought of as a domain
| for executives and directors, because those people are
| inherently too high up on the ladder to propagate innovations
| on lower, workflow-related level. As in, such top-down
| innovation will just miss small, but pilled-up issues.
|
| I think we shouldn't assume that there is no place for
| generalists 'low on the ladder', because with such bellieve we
| will implicitly ignore the proposals advocated by the 'low
| level' workers, who are actually the one who have to deal with
| the workflow obstacles every single day.
| spacebacon wrote:
| I agree. There is a fine line between innovation and
| disruption. A culture of innovation can burn resources (and
| staff) quickly.
| sheepscreek wrote:
| The point about trust hit home for me. I have always felt like a
| jack of all trades. I can solve any problem you throw at me. At
| least get it to an MVP phase then move on to something else
| (unless I lose interest in it).
|
| Like the author, this was okay early in my career. But once
| "front-end development" became a thing, I quickly realized that:
|
| a) I was good at it b) Not many JS developers had a sense for UX
|
| So the rebranding did help with getting more job opportunities.
| This meant I could be picky about who I said yes to. You don't
| really have that choice when you only have one option.
| pxtail wrote:
| I think that the rise of various AI helper tools puts pressure on
| generalists and maybe even makes it less viable to advertise
| oneself as generalist than before - with AI helpers everyone can
| be generalist to some degree.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| Eh, it's unclear how AI would actually influence this dynamic.
| If you are already a generalist and AI is good, would the AI
| make you closer to a middling specialist in a lot of things?
|
| Personally I don't think AI is quite good enough to help
| anybody but the most unskilled. Its output is less credible
| than a dubious forum post by a stranger. I'm just making the
| argument as if it has already improved enough to do what you're
| suggesting.
| Xeamek wrote:
| Imo it can go both ways; What You are saying isn't wrong, but
| on the other hand, AI tools will make the job of generalists
| easier, as they can learn/use new tools faster and can have
| reasonable performance without the need of having to 'get used
| to' the given tool. While having a 'general knowledge' isn't
| something you will get from AI, in the sense that you at least
| need to know what to ask/look for.
| febeling wrote:
| Yes, it seems like advertising as a specialist while being a
| generalist is a winning strategy. This is only true as long as
| there is no personal rapport though, as soon as some personal
| trust relationship is built it matters much less, almost not at
| all.
|
| It's actually quite weird. I got tasked with things I explicitly
| didn't have experience with from people who knew me several
| times.
|
| I think even a career change can be engineered more easily like
| that, within the context of client or employment relationship,
| and the opportunity comes up.
| code-blooded wrote:
| The way I see it, is that being able to demonstrate specialist-
| level skills in _something_ is a good signal no matter the
| problem you need to solve. It means you can learn. As a
| specialist you have already shown ability to master a skill, so
| if a project needs another skill, you will be able to pick it up.
|
| And quite often that's how you solve client problems as a
| contractor. You figure out what the actual problem is (in
| business terms), the cost/benefits of various solutions and then
| learn whatever you need to solve the problem. Only then you get
| to write code.
|
| The funny thing is that you may be a ninja Rust developer, but
| sometimes all the client needs is a cron job to move data from a
| spreadsheet to a server. Or even worse, you may need to modify
| VBA scripts in an ancient Excel file!
| jtwaleson wrote:
| As the author mentions Fractional CTOs, I'll chip in with my
| experience in that. I'm currently a Fractional CTO, which is a
| great way to say that you are specializing in being a generalist
| ;)
|
| You need to know enough about all aspects of running a software
| team that builds products. Not many people are such generalists
| and when companies need that skillset, they pay a premium for it.
|
| It's a way to do really interesting work and if that's not
| available, it's easy to pick up some senior engineering stints in
| between.
| fatnoah wrote:
| This sounds awesome, and exactly the type of thing that a) I
| love and b) I'm really good at. I can go very deep in a new
| thing while also fitting everything into the big picture.
| Xeamek wrote:
| Really glad to read this, while it's not strictly 'revolutionary'
| thought, having it formulated and expressed on paper does boost
| my own confidence in the way I aproach self-growth, as someone
| who aspires to be this type of 'generalist' as well.
|
| Thank You for the article!
| wofo wrote:
| You are welcome, I'm glad it was useful to you :)
| spacebacon wrote:
| Confidence is the key here. No one is going to say you are
| smart, here are the keys to my castle. The keys to the castle
| are often guarded with trial by combat. To thrive in a culture
| of open engagement is to regulate emotion that can undermine
| your arguments. If you can weather the onslaught of attack from
| being the "salient" (think military definition) force of
| innovation within your organization you may find yourself
| creating a legacy you never knew was even possible.
|
| A salient is fractal in nature, it creates opportunity at the
| cost of exposure. If a salient puncture into unknown territory
| is successful it was worth the risk. If funding, interest, or
| supply chain is cut off then the innovation is a complete loss.
| In a culture of innovation with too many salient advances all
| is lost. In a strategic innovation there is a calculated loss
| or an exponential gain.
| sackfield wrote:
| OpenAI famously used to hire strong generalists over specialists
| (save for research positions). They don't do that so much anymore
| but I'm convinced it was instrumental in building such a good
| team there, strong generalists can generally fit to a new problem
| space much quicker than specialist, which probably helped them
| ramp up their tech quickly. As a generalist, it was refreshing to
| see this, you could just be who you were rather than going
| undercover.
| mp05 wrote:
| It's a sound strategy as I expect "specialists" have a tendency
| to get caught up in minutia that aren't pertinent to the
| problem at hand.
|
| I would imagine that these "generalists" in
| software/development had some other "specialty" though; perhaps
| degrees in various sciences/engineerings, quant, linguistics,
| music, or really anything that demonstrates that the person is
| up to some analytic rigor and capable of following through on a
| difficult series of tasks.
| thecupisblue wrote:
| Sadly true, and it is influencing the tech scene as we know it a
| lot.
|
| While before, you would be a generalist first, specialist second
| - now it is demanded you are specialist first, generalist second,
| especially since programming is perceived as this "super hard
| thing" to learn that most people figure it impossible to know
| more than a few things at once. While developers understand it
| isn't, people recruiting them believe such stuff and are thus
| propagating the myths when hiring (outside a fistful of quality
| companies).
|
| And this kind of thinking has influenced the dev scene a lot -
| I've met hundreds of developers that have no idea what goes on on
| backend, yet are deep in their frontend career and vice versa.
| And no, I'm not talking about somebody not knowing the latest
| framework, but about people declining to learn even some basic
| stuff like SQL, shell scripting or deployment due to "its not my
| area" thing.
|
| As someone who spent a good part of their career in mobile, but
| also wrote a lot of frontends and backends, CMS's, dozens of
| tools, parsers, languages et al., it is hard to find a role that
| fits - either they want only the specialisation and then give me
| a silo of "you only work in this role and that's it" or even if
| they want a "fullstack developer" which means they are looking
| for years of experience in specific frontend and backend tooling
| (TS/Node mostly).
|
| It's becoming quite absurd - on one side, we are paying high
| salaries to adults that we task with breaking down highly complex
| processes and building the solutions to problems, but on the
| other side, we do not believe these people can understand a bit
| different syntax or tooling.
|
| Absurd.
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| I confirm that it's happening in France too. I have been a
| generalist for 20 years, but I will need to find a new job soon
| due to the standard layoffs of January. The multi-billion
| dollars company I worked for obviously needs more money.
|
| I worked on every technology ever, from C++70s to C++23, all
| languages (from assembly to Rust ant TypeScript), all operating
| systems, all topics from web sites to embedded programming, but
| my new resume will be different this time. I MUST say that I'm
| the best programmer for backends and compiled languages
| (C++/C#/Java/etc.), and that I also can do everything else if
| needed. I don't expect HR or recruiters to read the details of
| my resume anymore, I must describe myself as a 100x developer
| on the "compiled/backend" topic in the summary, or I may lose
| jobs.
| asdff wrote:
| It also doesn't help the training pipeline silos people like
| this in colleges with certain prescribed course requirements or
| closing off certain classes to nonmajors. We already force
| people to take english/second language/cultural/physical
| education credits to "round them out" according to the liberal
| arts philosophy. Might as well modernize this and require
| people to take some units of programming as well as statistics
| (although statistics unfortunately suffers from having too much
| boring/high school rehash/not that useful fundamentals to cover
| before you can get into the sort of testing you'd do on the job
| as a data scientist).
| sandworm101 wrote:
| It is the commodification of skillsets. Companies don't care
| about training good people anymore. Someone who will require a
| month to get up to speed on some tool is now a non-starter, to
| the point that recruiters will often recruit nobody month after
| month rather than hire someone will simply need a few weeks of
| training. If you don't tick every little box, you are seen as a
| risk.
|
| 1980s: "Hey, we know you can weld steel but we need you to
| weald aluminum. We will partner you with one of our guys for a
| month before you hit the production line. He'll teach you what
| you need."
|
| 2024: "Your resume lacks the following keywords: _Aluminum_. We
| are shutting down the production line until we find sufficient
| trained staff. "
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Not been my experience. I've actually seen the opposite
| effect in scaleups recently - folk's riding the "i'm a new
| guy" excuse for years.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Of course I'm not going to spend time or money training an
| independent contractor.
| lumost wrote:
| Anecdotally, this perspective is more common amongst early
| stage companies, non-tech firms, small and low-quality tech
| firms. It is entirely plausible to spend a career between such
| shops repeating the same activities over and over again. For
| example, wordpress developers for SMBs can command hefty fees.
|
| If everyone you ever worked with was an X developer, why would
| you believe that someone could be an (X,Y,Z,A-C,E-F) engineer?
|
| Likely, this divide motivates a persistent separation of groups
| - when I last interviewed for such a shop,they were stuck on me
| having professional experience in
| C/CPP/Java/Rust/Go/Python/Ruby/Perl/PhP. We ended up spending
| 30 minutes discussing what my strongest language was which
| likely told them nothing about my skills and experience nor did
| it tell me anything about the types of challenges they have.
| jwindle47 wrote:
| I've had a lot of trouble with hiring lately due to being a
| generalist. I've spent 10 years as a developer but not more than
| 2-3 at a time in a specific "stack." This has hurt me more times
| than I can remember.
|
| However, I've built amazing things for amazing companies when I
| do get jobs. I've architected and built end-to-end products by
| myself and within teams. A few projects I've worked on: a web
| scraping product, data labeling software for machine learning,
| commercial eyetracking software, a custom learning management
| system, machine learning models from scratch, high volume image
| processing, etc. In each of these projects too I did end-to-end
| work. Development, deployment, infrastructure, ops.
|
| Each one of these products though was with a different stack. JS,
| C#, Clojure, C++, Java, Python, the list goes on.
|
| Common feedback I've received is that I'm not experienced enough
| to deliver in a role. Anecdotally, engineers that I talk to where
| I'm located have spent their entire careers using only JS,
| building Next.js sites or whatever the current hotness is. Not
| that there's anything wrong with that, but it does seem like the
| landscape has shifted to the specialists.
| garciasn wrote:
| I don't have trouble, but companies are very leery of hiring
| someone who is VERY wide and only somewhat deep. Being I'm a
| director-level hire, many companies assume I have only led
| teams that do this work and I'm trying to take credit for their
| depth in specialized areas, not realizing that I absolutely can
| and do operate across that wide swath of expertise.
|
| I try to use the successes I have cultivated at multiple
| organizations in the past with this experience as evidence, but
| even after hire, most organizations take ~6 months to realize
| I'm not too good to be true; it's part of why I end up getting
| promoted a few times in relatively rapid succession at each
| gig.
|
| I find that working at smaller companies (~125), they idealize
| those who can wear many hats, whereas companies that are large
| enterprises do not and are much less likely to hire someone who
| can do it all, favoring--instead--those who are very deep and
| narrow. I have carved out a successful niche in the digital
| marketing space with the experience and success I've had and I
| will likely continue to do so, helping those same large
| enterprises who would likely pass me over for a FTE role, but
| happy to hire me via a consulting firm to solve the very same
| problems while paying much more for the pleasure.
| jwindle47 wrote:
| Valuable advice. I've found the same w.r.t. working at a
| small company versus an enterprise. I think I'm in the niche
| carving stage of my career but I have no idea how to sell
| myself. I'm in the same boat, I can and do operate across
| that wide swathe of experience as well.
|
| It's been feeling lately like I'm at a crossroads, I either
| settle down and "specialize" by picking a stack and an
| "area," or I build my own product.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's all a tradeoff as there are only so many hours in the
| day.
|
| I was an IT industry analyst for about a decade and basically
| brought that background to an internal vendor role.
|
| On the one hand, the company I was with valued a broader
| perspective. On the other hand, get too broad and you risk
| getting into shallower trade press takes where some writers
| have heard various terms and memes but don't have any real
| deeper understanding of most things.
|
| So it ends up being about developing legitimate expertise on
| certain related topics while having some conversational
| familiarity with others--and maybe just admitting you don't
| have more than a very surface understanding of still others.
| mp05 wrote:
| You nailed it my sentiments exactly. And funny, I keep
| thinking that I'll land in marketing at some point myself.
| They don't want to admit it, but your average "digital
| marketer" with no formal education in math or statistics
| really has no business trying to understand their audience.
| ozim wrote:
| We have a lot to do ,,thanks to" all the guys that are BSing.
|
| I myself also consider generalist with quite a lot of success
| ranging from improving code performance in .NET and MS SQL to
| setting up whole servers with AD and best practices to
| technical hiring.
|
| But I saw maybe one other or 2 really like that.
|
| Other 20 or something ,,technical generalists" were business
| people hustling to be managers trying to look technical or
| outright scammers trying to loook like they can do everything
| but then delivering nothing.
|
| It usually takes around 6 months to uncover the guy that is
| BS then another 6 months to convince manager guy knows shit
| and we have to fire him asap.
| hayertjez wrote:
| I can remember you having a "Plato workshop" and I actually found
| that interesting and funny.
|
| Generally I am against the idea that every one should be a
| specialist. I caught myself that I even in my head wofo=rust,
| because you market it in such a way. Even though I know this is
| not the case.
|
| Funny story I started as Process Technologist in my previous job
| (studied chemical engineering), transitioned to a Developer and
| went to a kind of proxy-sysadmin role at the same company.
|
| You talk about generalizing within the same domain (programming),
| what about if you have additional skills. Something I struggle
| with, as I managed a Waste Water Treatment Plant, designed Dairy
| factory lines and now I am Software Engineer. It is all
| Engineering but oh boy is it difficult to market yourself as
| both. So perhaps I should narrow it down on my own website as
| well.
| nicbou wrote:
| I'm a generalist. The most accurate description of my work is
| "webmaster". I built a website from the ground up and I
| understand the whole stack from Linux to the words on the page. I
| maintain nginx configs and care about accessibility. I write
| dockerfiles and comprehensive articles.
|
| It's weird to be pigeonholed when I love wearing so many hats.
| It's probably why I found the corporate world so dreadful.
| mp05 wrote:
| Whether it's fair or not, I believe that people of a certain age
| that are still "generalists" in their own estimations give off
| vibes to management or senior engineers that they aren't
| disciplined enough to "specialize". I can't stress enough that
| this is just my observation and personal experience, and not a
| judgment necessarily... but it really was the case for me and I
| bet that's the case for a lot of people in this situation.
|
| For what it's worth, I grinded and went back to a state school
| for industrial engineering and wouldn't you know, my
| management/architect prospects improved immensely, even as a
| super senior just now in his 400-level coursework. Obviously not
| everyone has the resources or opportunity to do such a thing, but
| if you do, for the love of God consider it deeply.
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| > give off vibes [...] that they aren't disciplined enough to
| "specialize".
|
| You're right, but it's still sad that curiosity (aka "lack of
| discipline") is frowned upon. I have learned Go and Rust
| because it could be useful in the next five years. HR hates it
| when recruiting, but management is happy if you do this after
| you are hired because they think you're some kind of "tech
| leader."
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Often it's not even curiosity, it's wanting to solve a
| problem instead of "doing work" at your "assigned role".
|
| If you want to actually improve something on your
| organization, you'll have to solve lots and lots of problems
| that nobody owns. If you insist, well, congratulations, you
| are now a generalist.
|
| I'm pretty sure what the GP is calling "discipline" is an
| euphemism for "passive obedience".
| mp05 wrote:
| > Often it's not even curiosity, it's wanting to solve a
| problem instead of "doing work" at your "assigned role".
|
| If someone is writing me a check to work an "assigned role"
| then by God that's what I'm doing.
|
| > I'm pretty sure what the GP is calling "discipline" is an
| euphemism for "passive obedience".
|
| Realizing that to get further in your career that you need
| to buckle down and be very good a specific thing is
| "passive obedience"?
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Isn't some of this simply that the practice of software
| development has become a more mature, bigger space over time?
|
| More companies in the space, with more staff, building more
| things?
|
| So naturally you don't want 50,000 generalists engineers in your
| FAANG. You probably have different areas of practice with
| different specialities, and recruit more specifically for roles
| in that area.
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| This resonated a lot!
| tomxor wrote:
| I've got the opposite problem - How do you hire generalists?
|
| It also might not help that I'm looking for generalists in web
| development, which seems to be saturated with folks who are only
| comfortable inside a particular framework or API. As a small
| company sifting through these candidates is depressing.
|
| To be fair I feel like I'm probably not providing exciting enough
| "roles" to attract useful candidates, and I don't have a lot of
| time and resources to throw at hiring. But I feel like I'm doing
| literally the same thing as this author on the opposite side of
| the table - trying to craft concrete "roles" but actually just
| wanting generalists. Although I realise I'm probably an outlier
| since I'm not a recruiter and wont be thinking like them.
| velcrovan wrote:
| Where are you posting these jobs? Asking for a friend.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| My observation is that generalists gain more opportunities within
| organizations over time, but have a harder time changing
| organizations. Which I guess makes consulting challenging for
| generalists
| namaria wrote:
| That sounds like someone who specialized on a company.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| That's not wrong but it's not the type of specialization from
| the article. There usually is a diversity in stack and
| technical issues within a medium to large org
| justinlloyd wrote:
| Early in my career, with the bravado of youth, I sold myself as a
| hacker/computer whiz. Now I sell myself as someone who solves
| interesting problems.
|
| I did game development, then embedded development, more game
| development, back to embedded, then robotics, then machine
| vision, then deep learning, then virtual reality, then back to
| game development (with machine learning), then embedded software
| in healthcare, then game development again, then vr & computer
| vision, and back to game development (back-end). And there's
| probably a few segues into other areas in there I have forgotten
| to mention.
|
| I maintain multiple online profiles, that sell me as a specialist
| in a specific area. From blogs to single page websites. And why
| do I do this? Because when you go to a steak restaurant, you
| shouldn't expect their pizza selection to be great.
|
| In Feynman's words "specialization is for insects." And I agree,
| but when selling yourself, specialization closes the deal.
| Specialize to win the bid, generalize when you've won their
| trust.
|
| Customers, like patients, usually identify a pain point they
| have, and they want a specialist to take away that specific pain,
| be it software or medical. You sell the specialization, you keep
| that customer coming back with the ability to solve all of their
| problems.
|
| I liken software development, and especially contract software
| development to follow the first principle of improv (also
| something I've done): You never so "no", you always follow with
| "yes, and..."
| itslennysfault wrote:
| I've more often passed over people for being overly specialized
| than the opposite.
|
| For example, I expect anyone that knows a "modern frontend
| framework" to be able to learn the others. HOWEVER, if someone
| has ONLY done React I assume (based on many previous experiences)
| they will be unwilling or unhappy using something else (Angular /
| Svelte).
|
| If they look like a fit otherwise I'll probably still do a call
| with them, but I'll be looking to prove they're very openminded
| and not stuck in their ways.
|
| Anyone that is married to a specific tech/language/etc is sus to
| me. Note, this is just an example, it is not specifically an
| attack on react (although it is currently a common framework that
| people get married to).
| ozim wrote:
| There is this IBM description of a " T shaped individual ".
|
| While being specialist in some area in depth you still get
| horizontal bar where you cover things that are somewhat outside
| of your specializations. That is theoretically best employee.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| If I am hiring someone on contract, I don't want them learning
| the technology on the job. I want them to be a subject matter
| expert and not a "jack of all trades and a master of none".
|
| When I was looking for a job after being Amazoned a few months
| ago, I saw two types of jobs that I was qualified for - a
| generalist developer who knew AWS really well and a specialist in
| a niche of a niche in AWS that I was _the_ subject matter expert
| in.
|
| I spammed literally hundreds of resumes using the Easy Apply
| feature where they were looking for generic enterprise CRUD
| developers and heard crickets.
|
| I applied for two positions where I was a specialist and had two
| interviews and one offer within three weeks.
|
| I also had two full time offers based on my network FWIW
| nerdile wrote:
| Are you a tech generalist, or a failed specialist? Are you a
| Renaissance man, or a dilettante?
|
| It's easy to identify as a generalist. How do you know if you're
| a good one? How can a hiring manager figure out if you're a good
| one?
|
| You're being hired to do specific work, unless you're coming
| through a recent-grad or other entry-level pipeline. You will be
| evaluated on specific technical competencies, because that's
| harder to fake. You need to show your ability to master at least
| one stack, language, framework, system, or technical area.
|
| Your specialized skills demonstrate prior mastery and an ability
| to do the kind of work they need you for. Your generalist skills
| will show through in the quality of your work and ability to
| influence broadly.
|
| So no, nobody's hiring someone who specializes in being a
| generalist. But, they are promoting them.
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