Ask HN: How to start a career as a generalist?

Hi,

Once I'm in a company I can make myself very useful by analysing, abstracting problems and telling people what they want from each other when they are having discussions and filling any gaps in front-end development. But because I'm no specialist in anything I find it hard to get my foot in the door. I could specialize or qualify in programing more, but I prefer the management and product owner work.

I'm 28, close to finishing my studies in "media and fine art" where I focused on experimental informatics, more precisely news distribution in the internet, interfaces and haptic feedback.

Wherever I worked I joined for some rather low-skill work and quickly become the one to organize at least the conceptual or technical aspects of the project.¹

I freelance doing some custom wordpress sites (those where you do need to write a bit of php) or small web implementations and work in a 3-4 person startup (unfunded, but self-sustaining by side-gigs). At the startup there is not much pay and I do some communications with customers and concept, design and frontend of a cordova/angular app. If this startup succeeds, I will most likely float on top and have a nice job, but not much equity.

Now the question: Where to go from here? The launch date for the first project of the startup is immanent, so I'll see how that performs soon. There is of course a lot of reason for doubt as with any startup, so I plan to look for a better payed job.

Thanks so much for the help!

¹ This way I went from flash animations (a few years back) for our client BMW to writing the specifications for a new outsourced MVP in one company (they offered me to become CTO on paper for the new child-startup, but for laughable pay). In another gig I moved from assistance to technical supervision of a short-film festival sponsored by the german state television.