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Comment by alexfromapex | Hacker News Reader

I’m a generalist and I would 100% recommend it over being a specialist because you get to see the whole picture. You start to notice patterns across different programming paradigms that make you a better developer. You learn techniques to quickly teach yourself and learn about the problem domain which translate into other parts of your life besides computers. I’ve taught myself how to work on cars using deductive logic when I get stuck and software engineering principles to make decisions when I’m afraid I might break something and I’ve improved my personal finances with data science.

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Technology specialists often find their niche evaporate under them. And they rarely venture out of their safe bubble. I think learning a nee one becomes more difficult for them than someone who tries many thinks but has a solid foundation in fundamentals and other domains.

There are some specialist trades that never go away: electrician, plumber, mechatronics engineer, HVAC engineer, and HVAC technician. Those fields and many more, customers want efficient masters of their trade.

What I understood is this author's definition of a generalist is someone who expands his scope beyond just programming. To things like design, business development, hr management, recruiting, raising funds etc.

Generally, it may not be so common to find an individual who's almost equally as passionate about all of these things. In the end we got limited time on this planet and can't learn everything.

That's not how I read the article. Seems to me he tries to do everything that has to do with (Web) software development, but not wider than that.

Well in that case the definition of a generalist is much more narrow. Would we call a mathematician who is comfortable with all topics within algebra a generalist?

If you ever want to rise in the ranks as an engineer, design and business are practically required.

Building the thing right is useless unless you're building the right thing.

Perfectionism is never allowed in a business environment.

In fact most of those folks turn toxic because they don't get their way

he said 'right' thing not 'perfect' thing - certainly those that building the 'right' thing do better in a business environment than those that build the 'wrong' thing, no?

You don't have to be equally good at everything, but if your business or field deals with a number of different specialties regularly, it makes your life easier if you know the basics in these other areas at least. You will make better contributions and better see how your piece fits into the bigger picture.

It is not because you are comfortable doing something that it is a good idea for anyone to be like that, we are all different.

And we need specialists, how will you build a new microprocessor without having any specialist in microprocessors ?

It depends what you mean by "specialist in microprocessors". There is enough publicly / academically available information about CPU architecture / microarchitecture to become highly knowledgable on the subject without ever having worked on a CPU before. But once you get to the level of implementation, physical design, and manufacturing, you need real specialists, since all of the relevant knowledge only exists in industry.

I think that the whole point of parent comment was that you need specialists to create that "publicly / academically available information" im the first place.

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