Why the world needs deep generalists, not specialists

> In fact if you've diverged from a straight specialism throughout your career it's probable you'll be punished with a lower salary, and problems getting hired in the first place.

I don't think this is true. Getting better at a thing has diminishing - often severely diminishing returns. Giving up being top 23% in programming in exchange for being top 25% in programming + top 25% in accounting doesn't seem like it would be much of a career liability.

> Employers want specialists, and pay for them. If your CV is two or three distinct things (I don't mean a selection of languages, or front and back end dev here, I mean distinct skills like say programming and accountancy) it's very unlikely to get you a better salary.

You're probably not going to get a better salary working for a company that only values one skill. You have to pick your employer more carefully. That being said, there are tons of software jobs in the banking/accounting sector ranging from product development to consulting. I'm sure that being an excellent programmer and an excellent accountant could make you much more money than just one without the other at some of those companies.

Recently I find this to be the case for me. I consider myself a generalist: engineering (a few stacks/languages), product, business, marketing, leadership and education. Recruiters tell me to focus on one thing on my CV and I feel employers don’t believe I could be even two of those things. For example with my blend of skills I was able to double the traffic, increase leads and social engagement by 5-6x at the last place I worked after my first quarter. My boss didn’t understand what happened and when I recount the steps and results to other people they don’t believe me. After winding down my own startup a few months ago I’ve struggled to get hired. People don’t advertise for generalists and as I remove certain skills and roles/duties from my CV I’ve found the hiring process gets easier. I’d love some advice, even more I’d love to put my skills to work.

> Employers want specialists, and pay for them. If your CV is two or three distinct things (I don't mean a selection of languages, or front and back end dev here, I mean distinct skills like say programming and accountancy) it's very unlikely to get you a better salary.

This really depends on your employer and your definition of specialist. There are jobs where following a very straight career path would be a disadvantage: you might be perceived as a boring candidate who would potentially struggle if given work outside their domain. I think it's fair to say that, generally, breadth is valued more at smaller companies where people have to multi-task.

In academia it's much easier to do well as an inter-disciplinary researcher than it is to try and be the best in a single field. The obvious killer combo right now is machine learning for X, where X is a field which does not have a strong grounding in computer science. Hacker news gives a very skewed view on the world, as if everyone is up to date with the latest developments in deep learning. In reality, most people in academia are pretty unaware of what's possible, or don't have the technical skills (or grad students with them) to make use of it. This is currently true even for maths-heavy fields like physics, which you may find surprising - I certainly do. Now is a really good time to get on the ladder.

You also need to consider job satisfaction. People who are pretty good at several things may be bored with a single track career, and no amount of money will make up for that.

Do agree. I am a:

- philosopher (Bachelor's degree)

- sociologist (Master's degree with thesis on criminology)

- international relations student (another bachelor's dg in 2 years)

- C# Programmer (by a workshop)

- Java Programmer (by profession)

- Python programmer / Data scientist (by self education)

- Data Analyst with SQL(workshop & profession)

and the HR guys around here just think "I am not focused enough" and don't even get into the technical phase of the interview most of the time. Sadly, I think, if I could get into that part I'd ace it. Right now I am super demotivated though.

Maybe this is a regional thing, I can not comment about how my resumé would look to an international company but the question of "what does it mean to be an employable person" is a valid one and sadly can be answered with hyperspecialization and/or knowing the right people working in the company.

"Full Stack Developer" is pretty much a generalist, and they are as in demand as ever.

on the contrary many job postings advertise for two or more core skills. Searching for any Finance or Advertising software position is likely to turn up something like the following

https://www.spotifyjobs.com/job/senior-ad-tech-engineer-back...

In addition to the standard Backend swe callouts the job desires ad-tech knowledge and advertising business knowledge. I'd be willing to bet they have a strong inclination towards anyone who's in the top 25% of both, but would consider cross-training for a top 1% in either.

As you go up the IC ladder the demand for cross-functional skills rises.

Is your experience with companies that could make use of your other skill? If you understand accounting, and you're applying to a company that makes photography apps, that won't be given much value.

Are you also good in your primary skill? Is it like 100% of engineering (say) + 20% of UX design, or 60% each of engineering and UX design? In the former case, one will clear the bar for an engineer job post, with your UX design skills helping to position you above other qualified engineers. In the latter case, you may be judged unqualified and rejected.

And what do you think about related skills, like UX design or marketing in addition to programming.

Having domain knowledge in accounting would certainly help you if you were writing accounting software. And similarly, having programming skills as an accountant could be quite useful for creating custom tooling.

exactly. I throw all art out of my resume and the best offers come from companies in the same market as my current employer.

I'm a generalist, but for each application I have to mold it in to a fitting expertise. Even when applying for product and project management.

even within companies, no matter what you actually do, your job title will haunt you. doing 90% frontend dev and being the designer, doing 60% product and being the project manager.

but that is exactly what the OP is trying to change because the current status quo can not be upheld.

that it doesn't pay now is only because not enough people are aware of the benefits.

it's similar to the problem of hiring for a specific tools as opposed to hiring people who are good at learning new tools. if the new tools are similar to the ones they already know they will be productive in no time.

greetings, eMBee.

Project management requires a more generalist skill set compared a senior programmer. Specialization is good to a point, but then it can be more valuable to branch into other areas.

After you learn how to program, you will need to learn what to program and that requires more diverse skills and knowledge to make those decisions.

Apart from him saying that his drawing skills aren't that great (which was the exact point above, it's better to be slightly above average in multiple domains than trying to be the best in one, which is almost impossible), I disagree with you that the mentioned comic artists don't have drawing skills.

XKCD looks simple, but the recognizability of these simple characters isn't that easy to achieve.

It's hard to reach that level of skill in two (let alone three) fields in a reasonable amount of time.

It may also take your focus away from becoming good enough in your primary skill to pass the hiring bar. If you can do engineering, marketing and UX design, but you're not good enough in any of these fields to get hired as an engineer, marketer or designer, you're in trouble.

I think it's better to pick a primary field, get to the top 10% in that field, while being good enough at a secondary skill. For example, "I'm a great engineer, but I can also get you your first 10,000 users on the marketing side. I won't be as good as a dedicated marketing person, of course, but I can get this job done." Then you can apply for an engineer job, convince them how good an engineer you're, and then convince them that you also have some design and marketing skills.

(10% was an arbitrary number. The point is that your skills in your primary field should be good enough to clear the bar.)

I see IQ measurements as a rough estimate of certain cognitive skills that have some predictive ability of how well you will fare in solving classical school problems.

The pattern recognition skills that most IQ tests ask are fairly similar to solving a lot of exam questions. But they're only a part of the skillset that you need to become a great physicist.

If Feynman had prepared for an IQ test I bet he could have made it to 160. The kinds of patterns you see on IQ tests can be trained. But it's not a particularly interesting pursuit. I've personally done a professional IQ test and reached 130 while in university. Because in school you're training similar kind of problems regularly. I'm sure if I did an IQ test now I wouldn't even get close to 130, because I don't do exam questions regularly anymore. I also can't quote any successes similar to Mr. Feynman, so I doubt this is meaningful.

What IQ doesn't measure is curiosity. It doesn't measure how well you connect disparate disciplines. It doesn't measure how ready you are to upset the status quo. And if I read Feynman's book "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" correctly (great read btw), it was these things that actually made him think about physics problems from a different perspective.

Well first off, 120 is very smart. I don't see how saying that suggests he wasn't highly intelligent. My only point is that there's a reasonable case to be made that his contributions had more to do with how he acted, his personality, his drive, etc., than just with being born smarter than everyone. I really dislike the notion of "genius"; because I think it gives people an excuse to never develop themselves or to be happy with whatever intellectual plateau they've reached. Whenever I hear someone say "well so and so was a genius" I always feel like there's an unstated but implicit message of "so why bother?"

I like how when Richard Feynman's IQ test score doesn't conform to some narrative, HN is in contortions with excuses why the test doesn't matter, but when we come around to the topic of white IQ supremacy, suddenly HN is armed to the teeth with factoids about how g-loaded and circumstantially neutral the mainstream IQ tests are.

I don't think it's disingenuous or ill-informed at all. Maybe people get sensitive when it comes to intelligence, but say I said something like "Drew Brees is one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time despite being short for the position". It doesn't mean that height doesn't matter for the position (short stature is a disadvantage as a quarterback), it just means that he found other ways to succeed. I think you could make the same argument with intelligence: once you reach a baseline of "good enough", what you do with that intelligence is more important than just having a lot of it. Obviously Feynman applied his intelligence really well.

I think the argument of "so and so was a genius so don't bother you can't do what they did" is a really defeatist attitude.

>There’s probably been hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who had free time since Leonardo.

But did they have wealthy benefactors underwriting their life?

Aristotle thought for a living. He almost certainly never had to worry about money, ever.

Leonardo had to churn out works of art occasionally to keep money coming in. In the case of Leonardo he could pursue an odd project and in some cases get someone wealthy to finance it and as a student of art he studied human form, studied the mechanical nature of living creatures. He naturally applied that artist's eye to form and function to doodling inventions, some of which he made and some of which stayed on paper. I wouldn't be surprised if there have been hundreds of thousands of people that have doodled such machines and contraptions and simply not had the wealthiest family in the world to pay them to make some of them as novelties for court.

Franklin learned about printing, ran away, hustled and started his own printing operation becoming quite a name in the printing industry then used that success to throw money at many other industries. When he died his estate was worth tens of millions of inflation-adjusted dollars. It's a hell of a lot easier to be successful at a myriad of things when you actually have the funds to tinker.

Look at Silicon Valley, you see founders with multiple successful exits. It's a lot easier to get funding after you've already had a success, it's a lot easier to get press after you've already had success, it's a lot easier to get customers and attract good talent when you've already had success.

it's true and with the increasing connectness then that means they can contribute more readily as well! Gotta get all those unicorns hiding in east asia to save the planet!

The list in the parent comment was "legendary geniuses." Crick was certainly not that. He did a physics degree then did a bunch of half-assed work in biology. He stole some data, confounded the idea of gene and open reading frame so thoroughly that we're still trying to undo the damage decades later, and summarized a lot of early molecular biology results in an oversimplified way (the "central dogma") that we're still trying to teach people the real nuances of. On the whole he and Watson were probably a net negative for science.

As for polymath, he certainly wasn't that. I've done physics, biology, statistics, software engineering, violinist, composer, dance historian, learned a bunch of languages, and written a novel. I'm a pretty pedestrian level polymath, and Crick was nowhere near me.

Sure, and its useful as an opener to the discussion of when to specialize and when not to. But it isn't an answer to the discussion.

It's simply not to be taken that literally but that doesn't make it tongue in cheek. Write some poetry, it helps understanding what others write.

While it's necessary to possess a substantial amount of knowledge, I would argue that people who are older and have even more knowledge in the field are usually too accepting of the current information to question it enough to change it.

Einstein started working on general relativity at 28, and Heisenberg published the uncertainty principle at 26. While Planck and Born were older for their most famed work (late 30s?), they were still relatively young.

I would argue that this seems to show that there is some higher likelihood in a scientific epiphany at a young age, when you've yet to accept information as undoubtedly true, and instead are questioning it as you're learning.

I think you’re kinda stuck on scientific fields though. I imagine it’s hard to know all of physics and chemistry for example; but I imagine you could simultaneously be say an excellent painter and also an excellent fiction writer, etc.

> Knowing, as we do, that an ever-expanding economy leads to global collapse

what?

Consulting is not an "area". You are supposed to specialize in some area and accumulate specialized expertize in it first before you can become a consultant anybody would be interested to consult to. Isn't this so?

Testify, brother!

A lot of the data science community was pushing statistics minors with some other major (or vice versa) for a while. I know that field is generally a bit over-hyped from an employment perspective to begin with, but I think that makes a lot of sense.

Which is true regardless of your current knowledge of the subject, when you compare against the hordes of people who claim the same.

You likely can pick up node.js baseline knowledge in a week.

you should know this was kind of a lightning-bolt comment for me. thanks!