[sleepychu]

When I'm hiring an employee, I'm looking for you! A generalist who will apply their wealth of database experience to my problems and learn what they need for my specifics along the way. I expect to pay some on ramp time where I don't get much in return.

When I'm hiring a contractor, I'm not really interested in paying them to learn, I'm interested in getting my need fulfilled as efficiently as possible. If the problem I have is my square zinc kitchen sink it makes sense to find someone who already knows about them.

[sph]

Makes sense, but I do not completely agree.

In my 11 years of experience as a consultant, people hire me because they need a square zinc sink fixed, but as soon as they see that I know much more than that, they ask me to redo the living room wall and trim the topiary.

Being an expert gets me through the door, being a generalist keeps me around.

The problem is that the square sink expert filter is the biggest obstacle to getting a contract. Reason why with 17 years of total experience, I'm still without a job after 4 months, my longest jobless stint in my entire career (to be fair, I'm pivoting towards starting my own business rather than keep being rejected by clueless recruiters)

[thrixton]

This makes total sense to me as both an employer and for hiring contractors. Sure, if it’s easy to find a square sink expert (it’s usually not), then select for that, generally though, my needs are more varied than that, even if that’s my immediate need and I’d prefer a targeted generalist to be able to solve my immediate problem with a short ramp up time and then hopefully go on to provide value in other areas.

[Retric]

If you need a contractor for 4 hours then sure finding an expert and paying a premium for that match is useful. However, there’s also a huge opportunity cost in looking for someone that‘s an exact match for what you want.

At around 2-3 weeks of work paying a someone that’s very close but not quite what you’re looking for saves your time and means at the end of it you have someone that you can go back to with the exact skill you’re looking for.

It really doesn’t take long before the contractor’s overall competence dwarfs how much specific time they have with some niche thing.

[akvadrako]

You don't have to pay them to learn. I'm also a generalist freelancer and those general skills make me as productive as most specialists, even accounting for ramp up time. If it does take me more time to learn a new tool, I don't charge for those hours.

This doesn't apply to everything, but Clickhouse is not so different from other analytics tools it requires a specialist.

[whatshisface]

One thing I like about this thread is the idea of a sink made of pure zinc as a metaphor for a typical codebase.