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Comment by crocal | Hacker News Reader

Not only that. Hard work and early specialising is a recipe for depression. I have seen this pattern repeat itself over and over again.

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I think people are just very varied. Take a graph of happiness/success over time for a bunch of people and anecdotally it can take almost any shape. I know a bunch of people who had the same specialisation as children (music) and their lives have varied massively.

spreading yourself to thin is also a recipe for depression.

my conclusion is to never go depth first (either specialist or generalist) unless you're feeling clear benefits right away.

balancing

Care to share any anecdotes?

In statistics / machine learning this is very common because in corporations, anything that can be used to control decision making or attribute credit tends to get locked down with politics.

Even when machine learning solutions have unambiguous value propositions and direct paths to cost-effective implementations based on known techniques and resource requirements, the projects are subject to extreme risk of internal political shutdowns, arbitrary gatekeeper constraints on data limitations or limitations of what technique can be used so that specialists in technique X can build up longterm control of a profit stream (I’ve seen this a lot in investment firms) and eat up all the promotion opportunities by convincing leadership that their version of a research platform is the only allowable one, and more.

The article “Who Cares About Forecast Accuracy,” by Robin Hanson is a good discussion of this.

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/07/13/robin-hanson/who-car...

Talk to 10 doctors. You'll likely find that the majority are depressed, abusing alcohol, abusing drugs, or all of the above.

Doctors don't specialize early. In fact, they specialize late.

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