Hacker News Reader

trump2016

Great reply. Interesting how your decision to become a generalist stands in direct opposition to most of the replies to this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13409239

Given that you probably have much more experience than many of the people here, I'm going to assume that your advice is more sound than theirs.

View on HN

The truth is somewhat in the middle, I think. An experienced generalist is a very different prospect to a graduate "generalist" - in some sense, all graduates are generalists because they don't have experience. See the thread the other day about how many people with physics degrees crosstrain into tech and programming.

Generalism is insurance, while specialism can be more profitable if the speciality you pick ends up in demand.

I must add that I have undergraduate and graduate technical degrees and spent from 1983-2005 building lots and lots of apps (I started coding at ~ age 15). So I pursued "generalism" only after being a reasonably qualified (but not specialized) technologist.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com