Ask HN: Is the Generalist Dead? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is the Generalist Dead?

11 pointstawgeneralist10 comments

Throwaway account since I'd rather not have this tied to my job hunt.

I spent the last 2 years building a SaaS startup that the pandemic killed. I've been founder or the first non-founder engineer for most of my 13 year career.

I am now in the uncomfortable position of looking for a job and it's not going the way it has in the past. I'm very good at talking to nontechnical stakeholders, gathering requirements, implementing them on the frontend and backend, building the infrastructure, and deploying the code. In short: I can own the entire process from start to finish.

Nobody seems to want this anymore. They want people who have spent X years working exclusively with Y framework that they can slot in to do only that. When I tell people what I've been doing they act like I'm crazy, that nobody can own the entire process from start to finish. They then ask me to do code golf or answer obscure programming trivia that only a specialist would know.

So here's my question: does anybody hire generalists anymore? Or did I torch my career by taking the entrepreneurship route and not specializing?

I've noticed this more and more over the years, both in job hunts and in watching colleagues work. For the former, having a broad collection of technologies on my resume often seems to draw the reaction of "So, you don't really know anything well?".

For the latter, it will often happen that an X programmer (for whatever X) knows their language quite well, but is utterly adrift if something happens that's outside of the language's abstraction. Often I'll debug something in a few minutes with 'strace', and they react like I just raised the dead.

If you're job hunting, you could do some A/B testing by generating a highly targeted resume for some specific tech that you know well, in addition to your "true" resume. Send the variants to different places and see what happens.

I'm a generalist also.

In my experience you have to tailor your resume to the job. Play up you experiences with what they are looking for. Once you get into the interview stages, let them know you also know a bunch of other technologies too.

smaller companies need generalists, bigger companies need specialists. If you apply for a startup of a small dev shop, they would love to have you because they need people who can do things outside their discipline, they simply cannot or do not want to afford having one person every job.

What kind of experience do you have?

What this guy said. Find a startup. You will never be happy in a mature company because you'll never have your full capabilities utilized. Learned it the hard way.

I apply exclusively to small companies, if a company has more than 20 employees I don't bother.

Typically they're hiring because they have some specific pain that the founder/CTO/person who wrote all the code lacks expertise in.

I have over a decade of experience of fielding phone calls from the CEO requesting a new feature by Monday, then delivering it to win a deal. I'm also good at getting on the phone with customers to find out what they need, then delivering that.

Finding a startup at the right stage seems to be pretty tough these days. There don't seem to be a lot of companies that are early enough to use my skills but are able to pay me actual money instead of equity.

Pick one area to specialise in, re-write your CV to emphasise all the things you did related to the specialisation. You can even change previous job titles to match your new field of expertise.

This is the way any field goes when the technology advances. In the 1960s most people working on computers then were effectively electronic engineers, computer scientists and software developers all at the same time. Now in 2020, you will be hard pressed to find a software company that cares about your knowledge of ohm's law and similarly you won't find an embedded electronics company that cares about your experience with state management in React.

I know a dozen companies in the Seattle area looking for someone with your expertise. Find me on LinkedIn, and I can connect you.

In my opinion, yes. I can't be promoted in my company unless I'm an expert in some specialty. They do not value generalists.

Not sure if you're interested in having people here contact you, but if you are, make sure your profile has the right info.

Consider contracting?

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