Ask HN: Good Job for a Generalist?
Jack of many trades, master of none. What’s a good trajectory?
Specialisation can work in many, sometimes perpendicular, dimensions: are you a generalist only as far as technologies are concerned, but have specialised in an organisational skill (eg. project management or engineering leaderhship)? I'm asking because being a generalist in all domains (functional, organisational etc.) feels like stretching out too much.
[1] https://georgovassilis.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/f696f-arc... [2] https://blog.georgovassilis.com/2015/12/26/defensive-softwar...
I have somewhat gone this route and I would say it isn't ideal - the logical trajectory becomes to gain deep domain knowledge and move into a psuedo technical role translating between executives / operational people and various technology specialities.
If you try to be a pure technologist with only average or less skill in everything and no area of deep technical skill, it is hard to progress to senior levels - because you are not better than a cheap junior at what ever they want you to do. They want T shaped people.
Your way out of this is to get a specialist role and stay in it for a few years, or to enter a knowledge intense domain like finance, medical, or science - and become a T shaped person who knows a lot about prop trading and a little bit about devops and web programming. Then you can supervise the specialists who do those things, with the domain knowledge to ensure they are building the right thing.
A qualification in the non techy domain subject of your choice is useful - qualify as a CPA, do a masters in financial engineering, or computational biology...
Media: Drawing, Painting, Illustrating, Writing, Music …
Web: The same as Media + Programming and System Administration
If you are a bit of a showman and know your way around food and drinks (wine, craft beer, whisky ...) there might be a place for you in restaurants, bars and so on. Media and web is still going to pay more.
If you had some skill of above average value you would specialize in that skill to maximize your returns.
If you don’t have such a skill you get minimum wage.
The ‘generalist’ who gets good results is either the recipient of privilege, a specialist in something high-value but invisible, or both.
1) Having multiple skills is a “skill” too. For example DevOps (programmer + system admin) or full stack developers (front end and back end programmer) combine multiple skill sets in one person.
2) Overspecialization can be bad when the need for a skill disappears or lessens. For example, if you’ve specialized in building webpages in a CMS that isn’t popular anymore, you will need to retrain.
I think you are interpreting Adam Smith to strictly. Instead of looking at brewing and baking as a skill you should look at them as a job that is a set of skills. Skill sets of jobs evolve over time and vary by employer (even if the job description is the same) and not everybody is going to be good in all of the skills required for a job.
Whatever skill set you have, the best general recommendation would be to find the job that matches the skill set you currently have best and adding addition skills to specialize in your job. Those skills with also help you with other jobs and might not help you to do the same job for somebody else.
That 'high-value but invisible' thing is often bridging two (or more) arenas or communities that other people don't/can't. You see this in tech and startup founders a lot: Often it's less about their tech skills and more about them having ENOUGH tech skill to combine that with ENOUGH of an understanding of something else to create something wildly successful. Or you have a group that between them all covers those rare connections.
Skills that are rare IN COMBINATION are as valuable as rarer single skills sometimes. A person that is a competent coder and good with people can be pretty valuable in the right contexts. Or a competent coder who has some knowledge in a specialized domain (like medical law or knowledge).