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"If you’re Google, it makes little sense to hire a generalist, I think." I'm a Googler and a generalist. This is of course just my opinion. In the two roles I've had, being a generalist is far better than being specialized: as a Product Manager and as a founder on a new project. A big part of being a PM is being the connective tissue between specialist ICs and silo'd organizational structures. A joke is that we are 'failed engineers' but many of us just got equally interested in UX, entrepreneurship, and business strategy as code. We end up not being the expert in any of these. But we are pretty well qualified to coordinate among them. I.e. our strength is we're generalists. It's a bit like the nervous system that coordinates the heart and lungs and other specialist organs. I'm now in a part of the company (Area 120) dedicated to funding new projects and businesses. The shape of the talent needs are very much like an external startup. We're headcount limited to 3-5 per project, so we really need people who can design and code, develop sales pipelines and do product management, "full stack" engineers and so forth. These people are super valuable where I am, because they are generalists. I think anywhere entrepreneurial will need many generalists. I believe think Amazon has this culture too. This also why I can create a lot more value in a company like this than if I was an individual contractor. I see comments on HN sometimes along the lines of "companies must be underpaying you, because if the value of your labor wasn't greater than your pay, they wouldn't make any profit." This is correct in a very narrow sense but missing the hugely important piece that the value I can produce embedded in a large organization is much, much greater than I can as a singleton (because I'm a generalist). As a rough example, maybe as a contractor I can create $100/hour worth of value and for the sake of argument can capture nearly all of that. Because whatever discrete task I'm hired for I'm Ok but not world class at it. But in a company like Google, I am leveraging huge assets and connecting them. If I identify opportunities and coordinate execution between (for example) specialist orgs like Search and Maps, the value I can create is massive because of the size of the levers. It's nearly unbounded but could easily be worth 1000s of dollars an hour. So if they pay me $200, everyone wins. The pie is grown, by being an embedded generalist, and I'm still doing better off than I would independently (even if my employer captures a bunch of the value I produced – which is fair, since they also provided the levers). |