Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I have shipped React and React Native apps. I've built nontrivial open source infrastructure/devops tools that are used at Companies You Have Heard Of. I've done backend stuff for NASDAQ-listed companies.

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.

Assembly lines beat generalists. As companies grow they can exploit this to gain increasing efficiency with minimal effort. So, either work for small companies, or be the front line manager who picks up whatever slack is missing to keep things on track.

Try consulting or entrepreneurship.

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.

You might have noticed that I said that I am a software consultant. And the pipeline is pretty good. But it's a different thing than actually having something consistently interesting to do.

I don't enjoy entrepreneurship.

Same here, I work independently for a few years now and it just becomes less interesting, and for interesting problems where you'd learn something new (I.e. where you are not good but you know you'd get there quickly) you cannot maintain your rate.

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) ...

I've thought about going to study math too.

Genuinely curious: how would studying maths solve your specialist/generalist dilemma?

Math is multidisciplinary like none other. You could use graph theory, for example, to study relationships in music, sociology, chemical reactions, transportation systems, markets, ecosystems, whatever. And the insight you gain in applying it from one angle will almost certainly provide a fresh light when you pivot back to a different application.

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!

Are clients are hiring you as a team of one? If so, it’s easy to see you as replaceable. If you assemble a team then you get to work on more interesting and longer-term projects.

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”.

You know, that's a good point. When I consult through some of our locals it's very much a team-of-one sort of thing because we're probably too expensive to rope together too many people onto one project. (Not that we're actually that expensive, but false economies around expertise exist throughout tech.)

Something to think about. Thank you.

Sheesh, get over yourself. I'm not trying to be a jerk but this is such an obnoxiously braggy complaint.

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.

You've heard of "be a multiplier, not an adder", right? My contention is that many good developers can be multipliers across very large portions of an engineering organization when given the chance. Dysfunction does seem to be the natural state of any business, and engineering groups are no exception; technical and social resources capable of and empowered to tackle cross-cutting concerns are that chance I'm describing and provide self-evident benefits over the long term. You're right, that sometimes it happens informally. I am asserting that institutionalizing it makes teams faster, less risky, and happier.

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.)

I have not heard of 'be a multiplier, not an adder' Can you elaborate?

Be one that makes changes that make a team perform 2x - 10x - Nx better, not someone who adds a constant contribution to the team.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com