[IshKebab]

No he's saying if you are a generalist you shouldn't try to market yourself as that. Usually employers are looking for specialists that are perfectly moulded to the one exact task they need at that very moment.

It's misguided of course, but that's what they think they want and if you say "I've done all sorts of things and I'm good at all of them" they'll hear "I don't have much experience with anything" and discount you.

So it's better to pretend to be a specialist.

[manquer]

On the flip side few reasons why I don’t favor generalist profiles (while being one myself).

- resumes which claim generalist tend to be SEO’ed than real, or AI generated and they will say experience dozens of technologies most of which would be untrue, throw everything and see what sticks .

In most cases it just tells me what they have heard of rather than what they know especially if they are not very senior .

- It takes really hard effort to be beyond a superficial generalist, even when they know some of those skills and remember them during an interview it is not with a lot of depth they pursued only in passing interest not in a professional capacity (that is fine, but it is a lot work to make the distinction in evaluation on all relevant skills in a timed interview)

- It is harder or simply not viable for a specialist to interview a generalist , so you need to have few to hire more . If you don’t have any or they are not doing interviews you are not going get more .

- Being a generalist with depth of understanding means you are the type of person who needs to understand things properly before doing them . .You are lot of time learning things which are not required for get the task completed.

That means either you need are prepared to spend a lot of personal time and be perpetually stressed or be slow in completing something .

It is hard thing to master to let it go . I don’t think I have learned it yet

- Complexity and depth of technologies change a lot in short duration when they are corporate backed .

I learned Linux architecture or vim or git 20 years ago they haven’t changed much. You can be productive in any of these to stacks very quickly even if you didn’t use them for years .

Last I worked on android or swift is more than few years ago . I doubt I could even build a serious app without spending major time . To be productive to learning curve is steep and the prior knowledge is limited in usefulness.

[johnnyanmac]

>Being a generalist with depth of understanding means you are the type of person who needs to understand things properly before doing them . .You are lot of time learning things which are not required for get the task completed.

It's just how my career swung me. I would have loved to have developed as a subject matter expert, but everytime I get into the swing of things, layoffs came around or the studio shut down. Now I'm freelancing and that by nature requires a generalist approach.

no one's really investing in specialists, so I have no idea how the millentials/Gen Z of the world will ever get to properly specialize. Specialization requires time to master something, and that time implies stability to do that thing.

>To be productive to learning curve is steep and the prior knowledge is limited in usefulness.

business wise, sure. It's a shame all business sees as "productive" is based on how many widgets you churn in that time. It's no surprise such companies want to force AI into it without quality considerations.

[IshKebab]

> Being a generalist with depth of understanding means you are the type of person who needs to understand things properly before doing them . .You are lot of time learning things which are not required for get the task completed.

Ha, I feel seen. Though also I wouldn't frame this quite so negatively. I've seen a lot of tasks "completed" by people who just got the job done without fully understanding it and they frequently get it done badly.

[pjmlp]

Generalist over here as well, that is kind of what pushed me to boring fields, UNIX, Windows, Java, .NET, C++, vanilajs,...

Changes also happen, but they are kind of glacial with areas where we are hunting the new shinny every here.

Usually I tend to be a laggard on the adoption graph, the large majority of stuff hardly makes the curve, and I have better things to do with my time.

Plus that vintage stuff that isnt' cool to write blog posts about, usually pays good enough.

Stuff like Android or iDevices suffer from yearly fashion, platform owners feel compeled to reboot the development experience every year, forcing app developers to keep up, and also as means to sell new devices.

[eschneider]

I'm one of those generalists who's done everything from bare metal work, to cloud stuff, to most things in between. Very few companies hire for that. They usual have some particular pain point they need fixed and I have experience with that. But it's easy to explain that if they need help with all this other stuff the product needs to get out the door, sure I can pitch in with that, and more importantly, I understand intimately how my piece fits in with all the other pieces in the stack and that makes it far easier for me to design and build components that fit into their wider environment.

That's something hiring managers do find compelling.

[ziddoap]

I didn't get that out of the comment at all, so I appreciate the clarification. Put that way, it makes significantly more sense.

[frainfreeze]

Exactly what I wanted to get across. That's why I have 3 personal pages/blogs and a separate forum. Only people very close to me know for all of them. Otherwise people get weird about you doing so many, so varied things. Here I m not talking even about work related relationships, on a personal basis people feel insulted and as if it is a competition if you list what you do when they ask you to. I have super focused, 16h days at the lab/office, of course I ll get a lot done... https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Planning_a_perfect_productive_da...

[pjmlp]

Yes the usual T shape kind of approach.

Most HR hiring managers, and headhunters alike, have a real hard problem trying to see the point of generalists.

They want the easy way out, what to focus on.

As I usual say I tend to do whatever, so is the life of agencies, however when applying for positions sell the skills relevant for the position.

Not e.g. "I can do .NET and Java", rather "I can do .NET, proud of X, Y and Z projects in .NET, and by the way, I may do Java as well if needed, there was this project...", something like this.