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Comment by B-Con | Hacker News Reader

In today's world, almost all jobs are moving more and more toward specialization. Being great at something is how you work and make a difference. You can outsource many of your weaknesses, from the mundane (ex, spelling: spellcheckers) to the complex (ex, accounting: hire an accountant).

In contrast, my mental model is that it is only worth knowing a little or a lot. The middle ground is only useful when you are filling a gap.

* If you know a little, you know enough to reason about the topic and identify how you can outsource your needs. eg, you know enough about accounting to pick and manage an accountant. * If you know a lot, that's your value add and you can provide that service.

Where if if you know a "medium amount"... * you still need to outsource to an expert most of the time * or you can't find the right set of expertise to outsource to and you must fill the gap yourself.

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My experience is the exact opposite. As a well-educated generalist, I’ve been able to drop into a number of different fields and find great opportunities.

By gaining “medium” competence in multiple areas, I have repeatedly been the only person in town who could bring three or four competencies together for a task.

I think one of the most obvious ways “jobs are moving” is towards self-sufficiency and small, flexible teams that can jump into new and rapidly changing situations.

Generalists wanted!

And how much does that pay? Being a generalist typically doesn't pay unless you do it as a manager. Compare that to a specialist in some domain in software engineering who make $500k a year. Companies looking for generalists tend to not pay a lot, they do it so they can hire fewer people and save money, paying a lot would go against that.

Mostly OK. I’ve done solo consulting and started up a few things. It’s never been about maximizing income, which always seemed to have too steep a price for my taste, rather about personal freedom and flexibility.

My early observation was that if you have a particularly valuable skill, you can easily find yourself on the clock in 6-minute increments and/or under someone else’s thumb.

As an inventor/promoter or solo consultant (entrepreneur, I guess) it’s possible to find a sweet spot where the money is enough and the pressure is minimized. I suppose a specialist could do that too, with help from an agent.

As an engineering generalist I have more opportunity and get paid better than most.

Agreed - being a specialist in my experience is far too limiting. I'm pretty good in a more than a few things, and have passing experience in a lot more. I can always find good paying work that interests me.

I think it depends on the job - the more advanced, sophisticated, the more specialisation; the less advanced, the more generalisation eg the neurosurgeon doesn't get asked to also do heart surgery - the barrier to jump from one to the other is too high, unlike painting a shed, cleaning a pool, mowing grass, carrying furniture. Tech has kernel and compiler experts who I think generally do little else, vs devops who are more generalist, have a more superficial knowledge of numerous technologies which often change. As I get older I feel my value as a generalist decreases when I look at the incredible depth of knowledge specialists have accrued over the years, and my knowledge is a year old and soon to expire - the eternal newbie, a dabbler, a dilettante. There's is some element of lack of identity in that, but it's too late at night to play Freud. This wasn't a bother when I was younger, and as sibling comments say generalists are in need, but I think that's mostly only in certain areas such as devops, sre, some dev. Personally, I'd rather be an expert, alas I'm not. I wonder if there's a connection to moving into management - with age, generalists are less able to jump around to new tech, so move into management? You certainly seem correct when looking at other roles such as AI, or data scientist - I worked alongside a computer vision, AR chap, and there was no way I was going to be jumping into that to help out. As technologies advance, there will be some abstraction, but increasing depth will require more specialists.

I would argue most jobs are moving to be more generalist. The jobs where you need a deep knowledge of a singular topic to push human knowledge are quite rare (especially in a fast moving industry like tech). Rather it is more common to be expected to be able to respond to a large variety of scenarios and be able to provide an acceptable solutions to be able to move on with the project. Most problems don't require the deep understanding, just the smart application of current knowledge and someone who knows where to start.

I would disagree and the deep knowledge is "non-existent" in this part of my life. But I don't have any statistics or anything else to back this up.

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