How do people who consider themselves as problem solver fair in the industry? | Hacker News Reader

How do people who consider themselves as problem solver fair in the industry?

2 pointsarkniazi3 comments

Earlier in my career I had heard that there are people in tech industry who aren't restricted to one technology and they will produce the best product irrespective of tech stack.

And they won't have any problems switching to a different stack to solve the issue or achieve their target.

Now every job requires a specific year of exp in 1 or 2 tech stacks. But the people I'm talking about are generalist.

Is there still a demand for these guys?

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I’ve had numerous jobs spanning different business domains: banking, access management, multi tenant services provisioning, etl pipeline, and much more.

I was also curious enough to deep dive into a problem no matter which layer ranging from clarifying requirements of a project to debugging an application to tracing packets and troubleshooting physical hardware.

I’d say that it’s given me a very interesting and enjoyable career. and insights to almost zero in on the probable root cause on any problems as soon as someone starts to describe their issues. I’ve been able to jump into any unknown projects and debug issues and implement features.

Basic troubleshooting ability, the ability to say I don’t know right now, but I’ll be able to figure it out has paid off well financially and career wise.

Once you reach a certain level it becomes less about the stack itself and more about the bigger picture. What problems for the customer you're solving, what's the UX. If the stack there for historical reasons then just pick up that stack. Business don't generally care about how you solve their problem, they just want it solved. If you have to pick up a new stack to do it, then so be it. Is there a demand for that? Businesses still have, and will always have problems they need bespoke software written to solve. Choose whichever you want, you'll be valued either way. Specializing in one field limits the breadth of what you can do but the depth makes you more valuable, just in a different way.

You are right businesses don't care about the stack unless they have already setup a stack. Then next time they would want to hire someone experienced in that.

They won't go for generalist. Even though they might be using that resource to jump on different tech stack which was not even mentioned in the JD.

Means they hire specialist of one domain and then use them to work on other domain as well.

But they will be reluctant to hire generalist from the start.

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