- People (co-workers AND management) may cynically use you for the tasks that are menial, messy and boring and doesn't lead anywhere. You become the tech equivalent of a janitor or secretary.
- People who see only one side of you think that that side is your only skill, not something you're able to in addition to your primary skillset.
In both cases, if you decide to assume the role of a generalist but want to avoid these risks, you have to spend some effort to position yourself.
These are the steps I would recommend:
1. When describing yourself, do emphasize the generalism. I tend to claim that I can do almost anything as long as it is technical, but I do some things quite slowly. In particular you need to communicate this with your manager.
2. Make sure you demonstrate the skills in the sides you have that you want to spend more time on. This means to volunteer for tasks of this type, and make sure to overperform on these tasks and market the result to decision-makers. This is perhaps the most crucial part, as it includes demonstrating an ability to show initiative and work independently.
3. Let people know that your time is valuable and costly. With managers you need to demonstrate that you can produce more value for them if they don't let you get stuck into something trivial.
4. With lazy/abusive co-workers, you may have to simply let them know that you're not the assistant they can hand over the boring part to. This may be more difficult than with the managers, especially if you're not good at marking your limits in a firm but polite manner.
However as long as management want you to work where you provide more value, you can simply tell your co-workers something like "I'd love to help you with <insert menial task they prefent not to be able to do>, AGAIN, but I'm afraid I don't have much free time until Thursday from 7am-8am two weeks from now....". Or you can simply say "I'd love to help you with <same as above>, but I've been ordered to focuson <insert more interesting task>, maybe you can explain your need to my manager and have him approve this". One approach is to make it inconvenient for them, the other is to force them to admit some deficiency to management before you help them.
I see so many resumes with massive lists of technology exposure. I assume the intention is to demonstrate the breadth of experience. But if you don’t want to work in that language or framework you used 10 years ago, take it off. Only list the stuff that is relevant and that you’re willing to work with.
The technical summary on my resume is just that, a summary, not a comprehensive list. It’s 1/3 of the tech I’ve actually used throughout my career because I’m not interested in a job doing Flash or Visual Basic and I don’t want to receive anymore recruiting inquires about Magento development because I used it briefly a decade ago.
But... I don't know Scala anymore, I don't LIKE scala, and I don't WANT to do scala.
So it's a bit of a trade-off; on the one end, you want your CV and linkedin profile to reflect how amazing you are, how many things you know, etc. But on the other, you want it to be an invitation for people to approach and hire you for something YOU want to be doing.
I've updated my linkedin to reflect what I'm fairly good at - web front-end - because that's job guarantee, and what I want to be doing - Go - for whoever wants to take a punt on it. And I'll keep tweaking it towards what I WANT to do. I'm sure I'll keep mentioning what I've worked with in the descriptors of different jobs and projects, but I will de-emphasize the list of technologies in the summary section.
When you are working in a company - if you don't want to have new responsibilities you don't touch it.
You touch WiFi router - well now it is your responsibility if WiFi stops working. You touched sendmail - well as you wrote quotes "expert".
But to be specialist on something it still requires quite in depth knowledge than "you were last one to touch it".