The Undercover Generalist

https://ochagavia.nl/blog/the-undercover-generalist/

by wofo • 2 years ago

208 101 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

Nah, I feel like this is a thing everywhere. At least in Japan I see exactly the same thing.

pasc18787• 2 years ago

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.

wofo2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

pasc18787• 2 years ago

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_dev2• 2 years ago

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.

pasc18787• 2 years ago

That explains my view that it takes months to learn a language whilst others say it takes days.

You can't be proficient in a language until you can write programs in to and that includes being able to build and use common libraries, debug in it and use common tools well.

dilyevsky2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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!

pasc18787• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

CM302• 2 years ago

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.

pasc18787• 2 years ago

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.

CM302• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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_dev2• 2 years ago

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.

ghaff2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

That's super common in the US and not just for hedge funds, it's practically everywhere.

tivert• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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?

al_borland4• 2 years ago

My old boss was looking to hire some more people for entry level positions. He had me review his write up before he posted it. For some background, at this time I had been at the job for over 10 years. I started at the bottom and worked my way up to the top and then out of that team. I did nearly every job at some point and worked all the shifts to know the different jobs on those different shifts. I wrote 90% of the docs, I defined a significant number of the processes, I wrote all the tools, wrote all the training, interviewed countless people for jobs on the team at all levels, and personally trained dozens of them (across the country and globe). I was also told I had carte blanche to speak for the VP and the team, and could basically do whatever I wanted. I was very qualified to be on the team by pretty much any measure. In many ways I defined what the team was and how it worked at that point in time.

Reading the job description, I had no idea what it was asking for or talking about, felt under qualified for the job, and wouldn’t have applied. I didn’t think I knew anything it was asking for. I told my boss this and he ran with it anyway. I’d encourage anyone to read the job posting for any open positions on your team to see how disconnected from reality they are.

You’d think that experience would make me take other postings less seriously, as the level of BS was off the charts, but I still have trouble applying for anything where I can’t check off almost every box.

rabee3• 2 years ago

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.

pasc18787• 2 years ago

Depends if you are after full-time or contract work.

throwaway4233• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

Yanael• 2 years ago

Does that impact the structure of the teams? Where a small squad owning everything or a department owning part of the stack?

JR14274• 2 years ago

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.

JR14274• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

JR14274• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

JR14274• 2 years ago

yes, I also applied for a couple of data science jobs, but that field didn't seem promising so I gave up quickly.

bee_rider• 2 years ago

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?

spacebacon3• 2 years ago

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…

Xeamek3• 2 years ago

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.

spacebacon3• 2 years ago

I agree. There is a fine line between innovation and disruption. A culture of innovation can burn resources (and staff) quickly.

sheepscreek• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

Xeamek3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

Xeamek3• 2 years ago

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!

wofo2• 2 years ago

You are welcome, I'm glad it was useful to you :)

spacebacon3• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

mp054• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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).

al_borland4• 2 years ago

I could see this paying huge dividends. Being able to throw a quick script together to make light work of an otherwise arduous task is a huge time saver, while also greatly increasing the quality of the work.

Even within the IT org I’m in, people who can do something like this seem few and far between. There are a lot of people who can tweak some existing code, but can’t take an idea and turn it into something.

I often thought I’d be happier in a job outside of IT, but when some basic coding skills. It would be like having a super power, compared to those who haven’t taken the time to learn the skills.

sandworm101• 2 years ago

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."

dilyevsky2• 2 years ago

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_742• 2 years ago

Of course I’m not going to spend time or money training an independent contractor.

lumost• 2 years ago

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.

al_borland4• 2 years ago

It doesn’t seem like there is much of a point to focusing on hiring for a particular language. If someone knows 2 or more, they know how to take some pretty universal concepts and apply them in different languages. If my company told me tomorrow I needed to use language X from here on out, it wouldn’t be a big deal. The basics come quick and quirks and optimizations will follow when using it every day.

I think I’d feel compelled to try to explain this in an interview instead of answering specific language questions. I’m not sure how that would go. I haven’t been to an interview in years.

oooyay• 2 years ago

From what you wrote I feel my fairly milquetoast opinion is now contrarian. I always thought being a generalist is actually harder than being a specialist. In many specialties there's the luxury of being able to encapsulate lower order knowledge that would be table stakes to a generalist and they're still perceived as competent so long as their specialty remains relevant and informed. For a generalist to appear competent they must not only dabble in all things frontend, backend, systems, and data stores but also know how all of these things can possibly connect or overlap.

It always seemed odd to me that someone specializes in a language like Java or Javascript. That, to me, is neither a specialist or a generalist; I'm not actually sure what to call it.

jwindle472• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

jwindle472• 2 years ago

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.

ghaff2• 2 years ago

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.

mp054• 2 years ago

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.

ozim2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

mp054• 2 years ago

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.

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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".

Izkata• 2 years ago

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".

Fun fact, the original meaning of "jack of all trades", even before "is a master of none" was tacked on, meant someone who couldn't master a trade so they tried everything (and given the context of referring to criminals, "and kept failing, so turned to crime"): https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/jack-of-all-trades.html

steveBK123• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

This resonated a lot!

tomxor3• 2 years ago

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.

velcrovan2• 2 years ago

Where are you posting these jobs? Asking for a friend.

tomxor3• 2 years ago

As in what platforms? I wasn't involved in that part but pretty sure they were posted to the all the usual UK platforms, Reed, Monster, and we also tried some agencies.

Last time we tried Reed we had to take down the ad because we got spammed with hundreds of low effort submissions who didn't seem to even read the description. To be fair I think this is just a market response to spamming in the other direction.

akvadrako• 2 years ago

You should try posting in the monthly Who's Hiring threads here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39217310

If you mention you are hiring generalists and the location / comp are reasonable, you'll likely get some hits.

tomxor3• 2 years ago

Might be worth a shot, thanks for the suggestion.

mkoubaa2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

That sounds like someone who specialized on a company.

mkoubaa2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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).

ozim2• 2 years ago

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_742• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

DASD• 2 years ago

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

— Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (1973)

weregiraffe• 2 years ago

There's one little problem. The character you are quoting is immortal.

wolfhumble• 2 years ago

Seems like people have been wrestling with this topic throughout history :-)

https://english.stackexchange.com/a/508907

"1618 Jack-of-all-trades

1631 Tom of all Trades

1639 John-of-all-trades

1721 Jack of all trades, and it would seem, Good at none

1732 Jack of all Trades is of no Trade

1741 Jack of all trades, and in truth, master of none

1785 a Jack of all trades, but master of none

1930 a Jack of all trades and a master of one

2007 Jack of all trades, master of none, though ofttimes better than master of one

The extra-long version of the expression may be considerably older than the 2007 earliest established occurrence might suggest—perhaps even a decade or two older. But it isn't the original form of the expression; and in comparison with the forms that arose during the 1700s, it is quite young."

charlie0• 2 years ago

The best generalists should probably look into starting their own businesses. With AI tools, it becomes somewhat easy to perform at an average level in many roles.

The Undercover Generalist

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