I'm not a web or mobile developer. I'm not a "devops engineer", and I'm not a "backend engineer." I'm a problem-solver. But to many (most?) companies, this means that I need to be classfied into a track. I need to be an X or a Y or a Z. I can't adopt those roles when necessary--I need to be slotted in and just go.
That doesn't really work for me. Which is a major reason why I'm a software consultant now. I'd go do a full-time job that respected my complete disinterest in being pegged to a particular role and was able to give me the latitude to solve cross-cutting problems at scale. But that's a hard role to define, a hard role to hire for, and a hard role to evaluate--which is why they, and other generalist-focused roles, don't often exist.
It's easy to get a job. I can walk into almost anywhere in Boston if they're hiring and get an offer; I interview extremely well. I can't get a job that actually leverages my skills.
When you sell your time, you need to fit into a role that someone can comprehend and already knows they need.
When you sell your ability to deliver results, nobody asks about your skillset.
I don't enjoy entrepreneurship.
I keep wondering if I should take the rate cut for a year or just study mathematics at the local university (which is free here) ...
Having a math PhD could also help cut through the bs of people thinking you're not useful because you're a generalist. Suddenly, they'd be asking you to help them with weird little problems. Which is what I'm pretty good at like to do!
Either you fit yourself into the structure of someone else’s business, or you’re in business. If you’re in business, there’s no lack of diversity in what you spend your time doing. That’s what I mean by entrepreneurship, not “SV startup entrepreneurship”.
Something to think about. Thank you.
Yes, companies have complex problems to solve, that require more than a few days or weeks of work at a time. If you want to just wake up every day and decide that you need to work on a totally new project, you're not going to be very useful.
Lots of people have a wide range of interests, but you pick one of the many areas that seems interesting and that you can contribute to, and you work on that for a while and try to make a difference. "Adopting a role when necessary" is not that different from slotting in to a team, since you can often change teams every few months if you want to, or even work across teams.
What you describe is a hard role to define and hire for, but it's a role that many engineers create for themselves by being both great problem solvers and willing to do what is most valuable for the company. Consider that maybe you haven't gone in with the right mindset to make it happen for yourself.
I also happen to think that I'd be good at it, because it's kind of what I already do, and I wish it was more common because that'd be great. Heaven forfend. I mean, you can try to pull the well-actually-it's-labor-that's-bad thing by trying to turn it into my mindset is wrong rather than let's talk about executive and managerial allocation of resources and whether we do a good job of it across the board, but the thing speaks for itself.
And you're right, that post is braggy. It's also marketing: from this thread I've gotten two emails inquiring as to the state of my pipeline and if I'd have time for a chat. It can be both self-marketing and a reasonable observation of reality. (Email's in my profile.)
It's incredibly hard to get a job. But your versatility will ensure job security for as long as you care once you're in the door, thanks to your ability to get into the critical path of different department's operations.
I'm a competent, high performing generalist who can work autonomously and self-sufficiently with enough confidence in my capabilities to have a high risk tolerance. In my current company I got tossed around from starting under a marketing manager, to getting shifted under the CTO after stepping on IT's toes too often, to getting pushed into a newly formed Operations group, to finally just reporting directly to the owner. While officially I manage a data management and BI team, in practice I'm the guy you escalate random problems and needs to. Creating a BI team was a byproduct of being a generalist and being the first person that needed a consolidated view of everything (and having the ability to execute on that need).
Looking for a new job is a pain. Companies don't explicitly hire for it, politics can come into play if the generalist doesn't know how to dance around the company in a way that doesn't threaten others' fiefdoms, there's no easy way to suss out competence from arrogance during an interview, no manager wants to frontload your salary on their budget when they won't be getting the full benefit of it, and a host of other things.
Generalists are valuable to a company, holistically. They're oil to the machine and fit in between all the specialized cogs to smooth things out and let you run the engine hotter without breaking down. But managers only manage their own cogs, hiring only looks for the cogs they're told to find, and at the end of the day whether there's oil in the machine is Someone Else's Problem. Very few teams exist which have the prerogative and budget to hire for that holistic need, so most companies just go without oil and don't think about it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Your job and experience sound very similar to my current role. I don't have an accurate job title anymore, and I very much see myself as the oil that makes the engine of the company run more smoothly. I wear about four or five different hats, all depending on what fires I need to put out. Good to meet someone doing something similar.
A firm without This Guy means that more small problems/needs get ignored since it doesn't clearly fall into anyone's scope of work or warrant the cost associated with the specialist. And if it gets large enough to not ignore, a specialist will consistently have to context shift to something outside of their specialty when something tangentially related pops up. This decreases their productivity considerably, decreases their satisfaction as they can't focus on what they truly enjoy doing, and increases business risk as things get overcomplicated or slip through due to a more biased view on the strategy to perform the work (based on whatever the individuals specialty is).
Practice-wise, it astounds me how many people/institutions expect different results from everyone else while hewing to the same practices as everyone else. Why do you think you'll be the exception? Why can't you look at the reality of what is working and what isn't?
This applies to so many areas of life, but it is extremely pronounced in business, where everyone cargo cults every little practice of AmaGooFaceSoft and believes that is what made them who they are. It's like there's an extreme deficit of original thought.
Parent showed them a generalist skill set and they saw a lack of professionalism.
Yeah, thats part of the pattern. Generalists often do not appear as professional as specialists (which does not mean that everybody who looks unprofessional is a generalist).
The hard part is giving in to a job. I think my hesitancy in this area straight up reeks to the point H.R. people/recruiters can pretty much smell it. It's just not about the money for me. If I was doing something I enjoyed and had time to work on creative projects (a.k.a. "my life's work"), I'd be fine on ~ $1000/mo (say at ~20-40 hrs/mo). But this presents difficult hiring/management challenges, the main one being the challenge of using my time effectively. When someone is always on call, management doesn't have to worry about this as much.
Honestly, I think companies could get a lot more bang for their buck if they put more money into hiring people to maintain and improve on open source projects that they use. And I know that there are jobs like this out there. I just need to keep looking for one that fits me :)
Back when I quit my 9-5 job in 2006 my favorite quote was by the creator of Winamp... "For me, coding is a form of self-expression. The company controls the most effective means of self-expression I have. This is unacceptable to me as an individual, therefore I must leave."
No company deserved me because I was a creative innovator, and even though working retail for $10/hr wasn't using my CS degree, I'd rather do that than make $70k getting someone else rich. I thought I deserved $250k since I was obviously going to get them rich - so taking the $10/hr job doing mindless work was less of a sell-out.
The next 8 years I tried a lot of things, and went $20k in debt. When I reached my 30s, I realized a few things:
1. You can be a mercenary and get the skills you need for your own business while working for someone else. You learn and get faster while doing tasks for your employer, so even though the code you wrote is owned by them... the code you write for your own business will be better and done faster.
2. If you're worried about getting them rich... just do what they say instead of innovating. Most companies don't innovate, they just maintain the status-quo and have you build systems that meet existing needs and save a little bit of money. You aren't making the next Snapchat at a 9-5... and if you are, you should have equity.
3. Freedom is not just about having the time to do things.... I had all the time in the world in my twenties but no money. Being broke basically put me in a prison. I couldn't go on trips with friends, couldn't take girls out, couldn't do what I wanted because I'd have no money for it. Now that I have a full-time job and work on side projects, I have the opposite problem where I have money but no time.
Overall I think having a 9-5 job works better for my lifestyle. Maybe I just needed more discipline and I could have succeeded as an Indie developer making games, marketing software, apps... and whatever other shiny thing caught my eye... but now I do that stuff on the side. I still hope I succeed as an entrepreneur and reach a point where I have complete freedom (time & money)... but now that I'm older I realize that was always a long-shot.
Take Tumblr for example - they sold to Yahoo. Verizon bought Yahoo. If I was an engineer at Tumblr I'd be pissed that an evil monopoly like Verizon that's fighting against net neutrality is suddenly using my code.
I'm more humble now than I was in my 20s, and I don't think my code is anything special, but I still fear that the private company I work for will sell everything I built to someone I consider evil. If I have no control and no equity I'm going to act like a mercenary... I'll do the job efficiently and according to specifications, but they don't get anything extra. If they have an idea and have me build something that gets them rich that's great - but I'm not going to be like the guy who built GMail on the side at Google... I just do the job they tell me.
So what I am saying is at this point, do not worry about all these things. Keep up the side-projects, and if you do that over the long-term, you may one day find yourself in a situation where you have the freedom to dedicate your efforts to what you find meaningful.
But wouldn't you be happy that all your fellow coworkers also probably got to benefit from the sale? If you or your coworkers got rich enough then you could all just focus on doing things that you think matter or better the world!
https://tech.mn/jobs/?q=&type=1&role=0&cat=any
vs.
Case in point - I'm a generalist who can very credibly claim very significant expertise at two disconnected areas (compilers and distributed systems), plus some startup/ product management expertise. I saw a job listing here for a startup that needed both of these and claimed they're looking for remote work - so, even though I'm not actively looking for a job, I wrote them; the match between my skills and their needs seemed too good to be true.
They wrote back the standard rejection mail - didn't even try to talk to me. I thought that maybe they found someone else, but no, they still advertise the position. I know it sounds arrogant, but there's no chance in hell they can find many better candidates (I doubt that they can find even one, but well, good luck).
Are their recruiters uniquely ignorant? Unlikely. I think many companies do a lousy effort on recruiting, and then wonder why they can't fill the positions. One of the reasons "internal referrals" work so well is that the candidates are at least seriously considered.
I have seen three approaches to limit this. First being to stay super field specific but implementation general, but not keyword void. Second, is to go super rabbit hole on every keyword/tool/language/platform you have ever worked with inside the field.
The third approach is to have a type one resume with a type two cover letter. That approach has usually been the most consistent for callbacks in my circles, and allows for your rabbit hole to be of the same type as the job description.
The more skills you are trying to get filled for one position, the less likely a candidate will match all of those skills.
Take any job posting with 20-30 lines of skills or requirements and it's really no wonder they can't find someone that meets all or even half of that.
I think that hiring practices haven’t really caught up to pace of reality yet. Nobody does the same thing for more than 5 years anymore, even if you’ve been at a company that long what you’re doing today does not look like what you were doing then. The chance that a new hire already knows all the parts of your stack is basically zero. What you want is someone who soaks up frameworks like a sponge.
> "If companies find it hard to reliably staff generalist positions"
The process of hiring for this is hard. Finding people like this is also hard.
~Someone with little resume-driven experience but good grogging skills
The way they throw you into cold water is using whiteboard interviews. So if you don't like those... sorry.