You have to be careful with the word "generalist." It specifies a (lack of) specialization, not an absolute level of competence.
People who are equally mediocre at everything are worthless. People who are savvy and hustle at everything are worth their weight in gold. But it's hard to sell that.
No-one appreciates a bad generalist, but a good generalist, who can pick up any piece of code or system you happen to have lying around or need to work with (e.g. can use tcpdump to debug a problem connecting to a client's server, or write a useful shell script, or do some C# coding for an integrated version of your Ruby app) is worth their weight in bitcoins.
My preference, as a (long-time) startup CTO, is to always hire generalists. The work at a startup tends to be varied and require people with lots of flexibility. I can't imagine anyone would hire any other way.
I've never founded or worked for a startup, but I would imagine that especially at the early stages, all your engineers will need to be pretty good generalists. You're (probably) going to need a website, a product frontend, a product backend, an infrastructure, etc... And if that work's being split between 3 - 8 people, most of them are going to have be generalists.
Maybe in 2004 but this is 2013. Rails, iOS, Digitalocean, heroku, aws, with a front-end designer. You no longer need to know anything about infrastructure.
My original point exactly. They get all these rails cloud heroku iOS guys and then how aren't the startups trapped? Ive never seen a job posting for an infrastructure all-around-guy
Fair. I've seen a lot of 'full stack' or 'back end' engineer postings - which i think is 'their version' of an infrastructure guy. If you think about it, how would a designer who has mainly pushed pixels describe that type of offering besides 'back end'?
I suspect it has more to do with not wanting to train somebody rather than not wanting generalists. Once you get in, you'll be expected to do a little bit of everything if the company is small.
People who are equally mediocre at everything are worthless. People who are savvy and hustle at everything are worth their weight in gold. But it's hard to sell that.