How can I find teams or small companies that need generalists? | Hacker News Reader

How can I find teams or small companies that need generalists?

22 pointsgendv14 comments

Most jobs are advertised for specialists or full-stack. Interviews are also very specialized. Are there any teams that need good problem solvers?

View on HN

Most teams need them. But many teams do not value them.

That's my experience anyways. It's hard to find a place that will value a generalist. It seems much of IT performance is gaged off of the image perceived by others - the image that you're an expert in something, that you're fast, etc. Mostly things that generalists aren't, simply because we incur the penalties associated with context and stack switching.

I would love to have consistent work, working in one stack, on just a couple apps. Instead it's constant reshuffling, multiple roles in a single position, etc. For example, I tried to post to a new team to avoid this, but they said I'd be a shared resource between two separate managers, two tech leads, and multiple apps falling under two different programs. W T F, that wasn't in the job description or I never would have posted.

I would consider myself a generalist, but at the same time still say I'm a back-end dev as that is my focus and strength. I can't imagine what strength a 'generalist' brings that isn't covered by an experienced specialist (which gets breadth through experience) or a full-stack dev.

Sounds maybe like a fullstack dev that also wants to own product research and development. A founder for a startup could fit.

All teams need good problem solvers. There are what are called 'T'-shaped developers. What I would consider a generalist is merely a TT (or TTT-shaped, etc) ones having more experience.

Another good area might be Data Scientist that work on problems and solutions without doing the work of figuring out all the implementation details (data engineers).

Assuming that you're talking about being a generalist in SW, there are many companies (including the one I work for) that has job positions that just state "software engineer". This is sometimes an explicit choice that we are just trying to hire good people who are competent software developers.

In general I'd say this would work at places that are: a) Fairly small (dev team <30 people) b) Make a complicated product or deliverable (this usually means you have lots of moving pieces that need to work together)

Sometimes problem solving needs some understanding of a domain. Otherwise it becomes difficult to solve problems in the said domain. Two domains that immediately come to mind are Security and 3D games.

I am looking to team-up with a generalist for 3D XR simulation projects who will be comfortable with NDK and Godot.

Now when I say generalist, I mean generalist in the 3D graphics/Virtual Reality/games domain. Anyone who will struggle with graphics technology, low-level optimisation will find it hard to contribute to the project.

So generalist term should be combined with domain. Otherwise it does not have much meaning.

There's Valve who really made a name for themselves with their unique hiring, they look for generalist problem solvers who are also specialized in one small thing. You could research their philosophy itself and try to find who else is applying it that way, or you could apply to them directly!

This gets posted a lot from their handbook: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/ac3a7d7a726bc40bf8792aef45...

Why do you think that full-stack isn't a generalist position?

Early startups, that are still deep into the product-market fit search. The fail rate is high for very early ones (and pay is low), so a Series A or B seems ideal.

I prefer to call the role "Variety Specialist"

What's a generalist, if not full-stack?

What would you be doing/want to do if hired in such a role with your current skill set?

Full-stack is a particular type of specialist.

A true generalist is much more than just full-stack.

How many years of experience do you have?

DevOps/SRE. Especially at startups we are the problem solvers it feels like.

Maybe at a startup. I'm DevSecOps at a large company. They still expect you to be an expert in some core language/tech. Like we work with Python, Java, and TypeScript. It's not enough to be ok at all these. You also have to be an expert in at least one.

Any company with less than 4-5 devs is going to be mostly generalists…

Reply on news.ycombinator.com