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by snowwrestler 4567 days ago
Sounds like you might be a good fit for a very early stage startup, when it's like 3-4 people in a room hacking a product together from nothing. Unfortunately, those are not really "positions" in the traditional sense--you won't find them on any job board and they might not pay well (if at all). You probably have to know the founders--or be a founder yourself.

If you want a technical position in a bigger company, I agree with the other post here to focus in on your area of greatest strength, and then salt your resume with your other skills. Valve talks about looking for "T-shaped" people, who have a deep expertise in one area, but competence in a whole bunch of others. You want to find your deep area and focus on that.

Another option might be a product or project manager type position. Those often call for wide skill sets (or at least familiarity). The downside is that the actual work is likely to be mostly meetings, emails, and spreadsheets.

1 comments

I was considering early stage startups but yes the main concern with that would be the financial constraints. I agree on all the other points, thank you.
I'm working at shopkick (straight out of school) as a generalist right now. I think a lot of the official titles of our engineers are just "member of the technical staff". The culture here is that people shuffle around from teams and projects (if they want to) and people touch a lot of aspects of the company's code base. For example, I've written server side code and android screens. As part of a growth initiates I've also done html/css/js pages and spent time analyzing data through sql queries.

The engineering team here is a little over 20 people, and the entire company is less than 100. I guess my point is there are companies that are on solid ground financially that will hire generalists. If you are potentially interested in what I am doing, shoot me a message and I can make an intro for you.

That is an ideal position and it sounds like you're learning a lot too. To an outsider it would difficult to find a position like this unless you actually have first hand knowledge. Thank you for the insight, I just sent you an e-mail.
hmm, I'm in the same boat and just finished my compsci degree. Any advice would be awesome!