Carving a Career Path as a Generalist

During covid my partner urged me to get a "real job" and put my name in at FB (where she then worked herself) as well as had some friends put my name in at a couple of other FAANG companies where she had previously worked. I was just noodling with some friends on a couple of projects so I thought "why not" -- I haven't worked at a big company in decades.

The gain mismatch between HR and me was immediately visible in each case. Two (!!) different recruiters asked me the same question: "Looking at your resume I can't see the narrative. Could you explain it to me?" They must tell you in HR school to find the narrative.

This actually makes sense: when a company gets to a certain size they really are hiring to fill a specific gap. It's best to quickly find the narrowest match to fill that gap and then move on to the next case. The exception is some of the very high level, "wide span" roles like CTO (real CTO, not the usual abuse of the term) something like that, but people who can do those jobs well will have long experience in these big organizations, which I can't stand the idea of.

The only way I could get hired by FAANG or any big company is if someone I knew well specifically brought me in for some problem they had in their group. And TBH I wonder how well I could execute in such an environment -- only if they group were well enough insulated from the big company's corporate environment that I really only had to think about the group's objectives. By "group" I mean 3-100 people.

I've done PM work, lead dev work, analyst work, internal training and documentation, market research, product development, engineering manager and QA.

I suck at all of them. The only thing I good at is communication and laziness. Being lazy, I find the shortest path (in terms of weights, not time or distance, weights being effort and mental load) this works because other people are also primed to minimize mental load.

If marketing gets me there faster then I do marketing, if developing a new product, finding an offshore team and training them to build it and then pitching it to executives gets me there then I do that.

The generalist is the laziest and the succesfullest because other people are lazy too.

Edit: not really, spelling is for specialists

The 4 Archetypes of a Generalist, a framework for squiggly career progression, and then... a pinch of spice I'll be busting the myth that generalists can't reach mastery

>> "your strength lies in bridging diverse disciplines, discerning broader trends, and crafting holistic solutions to complex issues."

This is the definition of fluff. It's a shame the entire article is like this. It reminds me of reading crime and punishment in its native russian - you'd get done with a page and realize that you took away nothing.

the problem with being a generalist is that no one believes you can do everything.

In A.E. van Vogt’s “The voyage of the space beagle” these were called Nexialists.

In 1995 I started a company I called Nexial Systems.

This article looks like it is written by ChatGPT

But how can a generalist be an interchangeable part ? Fordism is the way of today.