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I would suggest not reading too much in these self-help books. NYT, WSJ etc have great "relationship" with high-end publishers who propel several poorly researched myths but written in very appealing way. Self-help books are amazing amazing business netting 10s of millions of dollars in book sells per book. These publishers also know what sells: bottle a simple advise that is rather naive but has lots of anecdots and make claims to have found magic formula to make anyone insanely successful at everything. Entire self-help industry is disgusting because they take advantage of human vulnerability to the maximum extent with full knowledge of what they are doing. To some, it serves purpose of getting inspired for a week or month for $20 and that's their best outcome.

The main topic discussed in this book, i.e. breadth vs depth is perenial delima also recasted in multiple forms such as exploitation vs exploration. There is no magic bullet in one side or another. The art of getting somewhere is very delicate balance between two. The best approach that has worked for people is either get lucky or find people who have made mistakes, analyze their mistake and, of course, get little bit less lucky.

Absolutely spot on w.r.t. "Self-Help" movement. It has become a scam similar to all the Leadership/Marketing/Sales BS. Store bookshelves are full of these sort of books with claims that beggars belief. A little thought will show that there are so many interacting factors in any endeavour that there can be no quick, easy, ready-made and always-true solutions. And yet everybody is sold this juvenile crap and it is further propagated without appeal to skepticism. Any real progress due to actual research is further obscured by turning everything into "sound-bites" because the average person is considered "dumb" and cannot grasp nuanced ideas with assumptions and limitations. This toxic mindset has pervaded our entire society and does not forebode well for our future.

Yep and anyone reading with a bit of critical thinking skills will quickly discover they have one or two simple premises / theses and then 500 pages of fluff repeating it over and over.

Those generalist qualities can be very valuable at a large company, if you can handle the politics. Main thing is you probably will have a hard time going in through the front door as there are generally too many gatekeepers filling checkboxes. You need to go through the hiring manager or leadership recruiting directly to be able to tell your story to people who will get it.

All big companies need and hopefully develop some people who are like this - its certainly part of the role I and few others had as the GOTO fixers.

This could vary from finding /building a pc for a new start when some one had forgotten to order a pc for them, fixing the BACS tape, doing initial deployments of systems including taking enough kit with us to build a network in case that had been forgotten.

The most interesting one was cracking nt4 to break into a client system - I got a break just on a power mac and didn't need to actually use all our sun workstations after ours to run a distributed attack (BT security / Squirrels) might have not been to happy (yes I did get authorisation)

This is great advice. Generalists have to engender a high degree of trust before they are considered reliable for some set of tasks, and if no one at the company knows you then it will be hard for you to demonstrate your skill set effectively. Telling the story of how you got those skills to management (and having good references to back it up) is pretty much the only way to gain that trust without already being in their network.

this. so. much.

I am a consultant, and i go through this process every new project. It isn't just getting a new job, its about new projects too at the same company.

Even after you got in, since a large company already has people filling all those roles, than you need to get into other people's business/territory.

It sounds really hard, politically.

I can barely pass technical bars because the last few times I interviewed I didn't understand the game well enough, but the second I'm in anywhere I start to get massive amounts of work done and make projects succeed on less code simply because my non-dev experience.

I'm surprised no one has asked this, but why don't you just go and work for a startup (or small company)? You mention that you are well positioned for a role where you have many different responsibilities.

Another option is that you can start your own (you mention this too). It doesn't have to be solo. From the experience you describe, it seems like you could partner with a technical cofounder and really compliment their skills. There's a lot to gain from experience like that and it can open the door to a lot of opportunities in the future that you don't know about right now.

You haven't made a mistake. You can provide a lot of value to an organization. You just have to find the right opportunity where you can do so.

Maybe they want a higher total comp than $200-250k/yr. If they were a Director or VP at a big public company, they could easily bring in $500k+/yr TC.

Can speak from experience. My whole career has been in startups, and it's been great. But I just accepted an offer at Google. I expect to be bored out of my mind at work, but having WLB and making $400k+ a year -- without having to worry about getting a new job -- will be quite nice. I think it's a decent trade off.

But it's kind of sad that the place where I can get the most value is seemingly the place where my skills will be utilized the least. It just seems... strange.

> But it's kind of sad that the place where I can get the most value is seemingly the place where my skills will be utilized the least. It just seems... strange.

Think of it like this: The kinds of lawyers who get a lot of "on retainer" type work are the best ones. Because those people will not often utilize those lawyers, but they want to make sure they're available when needed, because when needed, they need the best of the best and they need them now.

Google is treating you the same way. They want to make sure they best of the best are available for them when needed, and not available for anyone else. By paying you $MAX_COMP, they ensure that you're there when they need you, and its a cost that is worth it to them. They hope that you do some great things for them in the interim.

I've noticed that the majority of my economic output so far has happened over a handful of weeks. The problem is that nobody had any idea when those golden weeks would happen: there always had to be some big problem that I was uniquely qualified to solve, and those don't just come along every day.

Your reasoning sounds right.

Not just reserving someone for themselves, but when your fingers are in enough pots, they’re unavailable to help a competitor and work against you.

Like buying a perfectly functioning goldmine, only to close it solely to drive up the price of gold.

But really, why be bored? If you find yourself bored, just use the new resources you have at your disposal to do something interesting! Being part of a large company comes with a number of benefits, whether it's access to smart folks, or access to IP, or access to infrastructure, etc etc ... you have an opportunity in front of you. Use it!

This is true. Thanks for the motivation. I'm hoping that I can pair with someone for the 20% time to try to launch a new project and satisfy my appetite for "starting up".

I didn’t think 20% time was still a thing?

It is. Most people don't have a 20% project though. It means less time to work on the things that might get you promoted.

But you can have one of you want one.

Sounds like you have internal knowledge of this process ... how does it work, do you have to formally tell your boss that your fridays will be spent on 20% time? do they need to give you permission? or do you just have to sneak the time in at your discretion?

The normal way it works is you accept a 20% role from another team. Teams post 20% opportunities in the same way they post transfer opportunities internally. You talk to the hiring manager and see if they'd like to "hire" you.

A common reason people do 20% work is to test the waters of another area of the company. It's also a kind of tryout for you.

You do tell your manager in this case, yes. They're not supposed to say no. Hard to say what the range of responses is in practice. In my experience managers are supportive of this.

If you intend to find meaning in your 20% time I would advise you to find a way to make your project fit in to some greater picture outside the company. The FOSS community has seen a lot of side projects come out of Google and wither in a world that can’t really take advantage of them. Finding collaborators within Google should be a lower priority. It’s not quite as self-directed but you still have great latitude in choosing what to do and a better shot at making an impact on the world.

Bored at google? Good luck.. there is so much to learn if you look.

Not using all of your skills can be a concern but you will gain new skills.

Hey,

So... not that I think it's necessarily easy but how did you score such a lucrative gig at google? How can I do the same? Do they hire generalists? Thanks.

I'm a generalist as well. I can't help you out too much. It's mostly luck.

If you study Cracking the Coding Interview, and you know that book inside and out, and you feel confident you can solve all of the questions in it (you can ignore the Java/C++ stuff if you're not applying for one of those jobs) -- you have a /chance/ to get hired.

But there's lots of smart people with those skills who fail the interview every day.

Just wanted to say thanks for your reply. This (CtCI) seems to be the most frequent advice. I guess I'll get cracking (ha!).

Apologies upfront if this is a bit uncouth but if you don't mind my asking; what job are you doing which pays you $400,000 a year as a salaried employee?

I'm in europe, I guess we are a bit behind on the pay scales but that's an absolutely incredible amount of money to me; I'm genuinely curious what you're being paid to do for that level of compensation...

to own a house in mountain view.

This is just for a regular SWE position at Google. The pay there is banana town. I'm glad to be a part of it.

Not for regular SWE. Def for one of the better ones.

SWE? Software engineer? What kind of software? For 400k I suspect you're not working on a CRUD ;)

I think CRUD gets an undeserved low reputation on HN.

A CRUD ceases to be a CRUD when one is dealing with Google-like scale and/or arbitrarily complex requirements behind each of those letters in the acronym!

I expect at Google scale C,R,U and D are each a separate specialized domains.

Take a look at this table: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/20-companies-profit-per-emp...

There are no European companies on the list.

Companies that make enormous profits per employee can pay top employees a lot of money.

When people wonder why Americans work so much part of the reason is that these people desperately want to make it to the top where the rewards are lucrative. Is this rational? Probably not, because the top seems to get smaller in every field and most don't make it.

Also take a look at the BigLaw Profits per Partner. Top equity partners can make $4 million+ because they are at the top of a pyramid. Mostly this is in the US

I think for many people, in particular people who are looking for personal development rather than just compensation, the difference between 200k and 400k is probably not meaningful.

Personally, I don't think I'd ever give up a software engineering job for a managerial position even if the compensation was higher.

Well, in some cases it's considered a career change and not a promotion. In which case you might not even be paid more... :)

> the difference between 200k and 400k is probably not meaningful.

Where these compensation packages are given so frequently (SV), it is very meaningful. It's the difference between being able to buy a home vs being forced to rent a 1-bedroom apartment.

And/or the difference between working for another 20 years while paying the mortgage, or stacking your extra cash and retiring in 10.

I'm not sure I understand your meaning. Are you saying that buying a house delays retirement? I'm not sure that is really true.

Mortgage payments gets you equity on your home, which goes a long way in retirement. Rent payments disappear, and you will have to continue to pay rent when retired.

They're saying if you make more then there's potential to save more and retire early.

Right, this, sorry if it wasn't clear. It all depends on how much extra you have. I mean, if 200k is just making ends meet, 400k means infinitely larger savings!

This is very similar to my own experience. Most of my career was at small startups doing generalist things. So I could get back into that job very easily. But going to a large public company can give a 50% comp boost, but job with more restricted scope.

I have similar struggles (double digit years in my career). I've always worked at smaller companies being the jack-of-all-trades. Given the work no one else could, would, or was entrusted to do. I get plagued by recruiters and companies just about every single day from both large tech companies to younger and startups. At almost all the big companies I get onsite at the feedback I get is I'm stronger in one area, and need to work more on another area or I'm not as strong in a specific area they wanted. At this point I feel like I'm stuck grinding LeetCode for the rest of my life to find my way in to these larger companies.

Nothing wrong with smaller companies and startups, but the pay increase and resources available in a larger company are something I would like to experience. Getting my foot in the door is a frustration though.

I have had a lot of smaller company experience (LI in profile in case you want to verify :) ). I got into large companies two times (and then left later, but that's not relevant).

Both times it was as a contractor. The first time I was employed by a body shop as just simple staff augmentation. This was in the 2000s, but I believe they are still around. I think if I'd wanted to convert to full time it would have been a process, but I definitely got to meet employees and managers from the bigco (and connect to them on linkedin).

The second time was in the mid 2010s when a friend was at a big company (his startup had been acquired and then acquired again). The friend was able to intro me directly to the hiring manager's manager. We had a friendly conversation, I had a quick tech screen and they brought me in. That would have been no trouble at all to convert to FTE (in fact they had a conversation with me that began with, paraphrasing: "how much do you like money?").

I think the best way into a larger company as a generalist beyond the early stage of their career is an acquihire, but the second best is as a contractor. Risk is lower all around (well, except for you).

I never understood why larger companies do this, I.e. either early stage of your career or as a contractor (with some possibility to FTE) and not as directly to FTE if you're a generalist. Companies do at-will employment, but I guess it is difficult to let go without evidence (I.e. performance reviews) though I'm not really sure.

When some of the contractors went FTE at a previous role, their salaries dropped dramatically (though they were paying for their own health insurance through an agency).

I'm a generalist with a longer career and similar-ish pattern to you who has worked with mostly large organizations, but I ran and sold my family's small engineering business, and have kept coding for myself in multiple ways the whole time.

I would not assume that individuals working as specialists for 10 years in a field are actually specialists. Too frequently I encounter individuals who have plateaued while their peers have actually become true specialists. There are many reasons why this happens, but rightly or wrongly, many specialists aren't what you might think they are. I'm sure a lot are actually anxious about their own abilities.

I'd personally suggest evaluating whether you are able to better set boundaries. Making a progressive change to your role is often a possibility but it needs understanding and navigation. That way you can keep what you like and get more of what you want. Switching to just being a senior developer as you've framed it might not be actually what you want, and there are alternatives to get what you want.

On starting your own business you have to come to terms with not doing everything. If you are successful you will get away from anything that is originally fun and desirable. A senior developer mentors folks and derives satisfaction from that activity. The trade-off is often less focused coding and delivery. They are technical leaders with more flexibility in how their work may look.

Your observation on running a business is good, but the key is the feelings that you'll have. If you are too tied actually doing particular tasks versus running a business you'll not be able to succeed. Also, be careful about putting down enterprise app developers. They often have a side gig outside of work that the stability enables. They also know how certain parts of big businesses function which would give your business a leg up. Startup people have good talk about product-market fit, but there are many companies you don't hear about being acquired which involve some enterprise software product that a startup would never land on. That said, the upsides to the approach are different.

The larger the organization (private sector or not), the more likely it is to favor specialists, not least because smaller organizations simply cannot allow most of the people to be specialists (there aren't enough of them to do all the things).

So, if you want positions at large organizations, there will be more demand for specialists, and the reverse is true with small organizations. Whether you made a "mistake" or not, depends on whether you would rather work at small organizations, or large ones.

Note: yes, there are a minority of generalists at large organizations, and a few specialists at small ones, but the percentages are very different.

Working at a company who transitioned from startup to large company, the thing I see a lot of "just get shit done" startupy type people get killed on is that they can't just go do things themselves. They have to build consensus and get other teams to do the work for them. Once can see this as politics. One can also see this as leveraging large groups of employees to get work done.

The other big one I see is that at a certain point companies can afford to shift from "duct tape it till we get funding" to "we have funding, we can spend time engineering solutions." Which also means that they go slow, write way more docs, etc.

It seems strange to me to call [developer, PM, marketing, support, management] anything other than a progression of increasing specialization. It looks like a perfectly straightforward path from individual contributor to executive. Everything listed here sounds like some aspect of software creation. I would certainly hope that a VP/Eng has had experience with actual development! Surely nobody assumes that you should have started out your career as a VP/Eng?

I must be what the author calls "a well-rounded mediocrity", because my career path is nowhere near as direct as that, if I could be said to have a career at all.

I would say that your issue is not to do with generalist vs specialist, its more to do with where you are in your career and how much you contribute. Once you are above a VP level you are no longer a good candidate if your resume lists "proficient in react" as a skill. Its more important to showcase what company level changes are you able to drive. For example your CV should have achievements like - grew the team from size x to y, end to end ownership of a key feature of the product that was able to drive sales by x%, etc.

On these lines generalists "generally" win. I find that when people talk about generealists vs specialists they focus more on number of things they can do. But its more important how you define the skill. You knowing and correctly identifying the data set for marketing team is way more valuable than actually being responsible for querying and putting the data together. Personally I try to spend more time on defining my tasks clearly, so that I can maximise my impact on the organisation. Hopefully this framework is of some help and you can relate to it. All the best friend!

I disagree with the article as well. Whenever I stumble upon really good engineers they are for the most part hyper specialized in what they do.

I would like to add that after I stopped saying yes to everything, my career took a upward trend. It wasn't until I said: you know what I'm python-django specifically django developer, and won't do anything else, that I started getting progressively better jobs in the area I'm actually an expert on.

Then there is the business cut cost part of it, which annoys the hell out of me. Most managers will (conveniently) tell you should be open to learning new things, because "personal growth"... the reality of the situation is that you will end up over working yourself to death covering responsibilities that should be for a new team mate.

Can you elaborate on the upward trend? You mean like going to Senior, Principal, etc.? I feel like saying yes to everything ultimately just moves you to the business side / customer side, which eventually leads to budgetary control over a larger group.

Ultimately in my experience titles mean nothing, right now officially I'm just "software engineer", you can be a CTO in a 2 man company, which is cool I guess but it really doesn't mean much.

What I mean with upward trend is that I can negotiate conditions like benefits (remote, insurance etc... ) and a better salary, etc..

I’m a generalist and it is awesome!

When I get bored I rewrite my cv and maybe skill up a bit on my own time (or at work) and re-emerge as a new xxx

I’ve gone from support to ops to development to ops to development to devops and I can tell you that I am 100 times more valuable in any role than someone who has specialised for ten years in the same role.

Being a generalist rules, embrace it and get with it just decide what you want to do next and make it happen.

YOU WILL BE AWESOME AT IT BECAUSE YOU HAVE DONE LOTS :) it

Is that really a generalist, though?

In my mind a generalist is someone who e.g. knows quant finance up to hedge fund snuff and knows how to configure wsgi/asgi servers with nginx; can read and rebate legal documentation and use an SMT solver. I don't feel that anyone who hasn't eg watched the recent Jordan Peterson/Slavoj Zizek debate and has a working understanding of Ripser and UMAP can call himself a generalist.

> Anyone who hasn't eg watched the recent Jordan Peterson/Slavoj Zizek debate

I watched that debate and found it a tedious rehashing of tired old talking points and straw men criticisms of Capitalism/Marxism. To use that in any way of a yardstick of intellectual depth seems odd.

Did you, though?

The first hour was Jordan Peterson making a hacky point that capitalism is good and communism's not and Zizek doing Keith Jarret-type improv touching on a thousand topics. Then in the actual debate rounds Zizek got Jordan Peterson to agree with him.

It was an actual debate. There was a winner and not in the sense of a rap battle. The loser was happy to have had it.

"generalist" is opposing "specialist" and doesn't mean "everythingist". Someone who has done some full-stack dev, has run some marketing campaigns, and can kick out usable graphic design work when needed is a generalist (not an incredible one, but one nonetheless). What you're describing, if not a difference in kind (i.e. something other than generalist), is absolutely a significant difference of degree to the tune of the difference in degree between a mediocre junior software engineer fresh out of college and a 10x (in practice) senior software engineer with years of experience. They're absolutely not appropriate for the same set of jobs, but they absolutely are both "software engineers".

Why is the term "generalist" so tightly constrained in your mind?

>...where I've done several different positions instead of getting better at one and I'm wondering if I made a mistake.

Allow me to try to help alleviate that mistake feeling. :)

I specialised the feck out of my role[s] over the last x > decade, becoming an "expert" in Exchange in a FAANG (one guess as to which one).

It got to the point where I was debugging native code issues in Windows and making code changes to the Exchange product (as a whole), which was distributed across the world.

Now, during this time, the "cloud" went from being a niche thing to being the predominant player in the market. So, whilst I was !pde.deep in a thread, people were learning CI/CD, Azure, AWS, etc.

So, imagine my dismay at having one day been asked to seek opportunities elsewhere and, resultantly, coming to find the descriptions and requirements for "Software Developer" or "SRE" positions in the "real world".

Niche skills are good because they take years to develop and you learn skills that can help you understand/rationalise other areas that you may not have gotten before that experience occurred - but those skills can also become antiquated, quite quickly.

No one's looking for anyone who can debug native or managed software clients, anymore. No one's even looking for SDETs, anymore, it seems.

In other words, on paper, code changes/fixes that have been delivered to millions of people might be somewhat impressive but the lack of any CI/CD in production use (because other teams owned that) means an even more glaring "hole" in my experience - that someone else has and could more easily fill that role.

Companies want "right now", not "has the potential to learn this skill very easily and very quickly".

So, I had to have a huge learning curve transitioning back to the common market (and that's not a complaint, by the way, just an observation), which hindered my ability to obtain gainful employment for quite some time.

So, don't think of it as a mistake. Compared to you, I think that I've made the mistake: I'm envious of those who shifted around the start-ups and amassed quite a bit of skills, which made them far more relevant and marketable to the current market.

whether you made it or not depends on what you want. you clearly have the capacity go whatever direction you prefer, so don't judge yourself based on other people's opinions. obviously you can't have everything at the same time, but the question is exactly this one: if you had to choose, would you go in the same direction again? yeah, there's always the "what if I had done this...", but if you are satisfied with what you are doing now, then you are making it. maybe tomorrow you change your mind, but hey, that will be another day.

Wouldn't you be bored with a specialist position in one company? I get bored when doing the same thing for too long. That's usually around the 2 years mark.

I've done a lot of Rails then dived deep into mobile dev (native iOS & Android). I also dealt a bit with embedded and ended up as the bridge between a taiwanese team and a french one. Contractor life can be interesting :p

As you, I sometimes wish I could just stay in one role in a bigger company but I feel like I would not be able to fit in a box for long.

Just picked up a book called "The Second Mountain" by David Brooks. It's a shot in the dark but may actually help with the struggling you are having with your next opportunity. I'm 13 years in my job (same company!) and feel exactly the same as you. I feel like it's time for my next "trick" so hoping to find it soon.

From my experience job-seeking and hiring, it depends entirely on the culture created by the founders/chiefs, which in turn depends on their own style of skill cultivation. If they are generalists, they will likely value their ability as generalists and that of others, same for specialists. I have specialized in programming, but I am definitely a generalist, and all my best fits (including my current employer) have been working under and alongside fellow generalists at small companies. I specifically say small companies because there aren’t already teams of specialists and even the one or two existing specialists will usually appreciate anyone’s interest/help.

How would I reach you? How about you reach me. I’m looking for generalists at all skill levels.