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Comment by ilghiro | Hacker News Reader

I was actually speaking with a a friend and tech recruiter about this yesterday. He mentioned that actually, being a "One Trick Pony" is pretty good for people looking to contract.

Obviously he didn't mean simply knowing one language or framework and no others whatsoever but rather that for contract work companies are looking for people that are highly specialized to come in for a very short period of time.

A Full-Stack Super Ninja Developer is still a good thing to have on payroll but you're going to need some temporary guys that know one part of your stack inside out, especially at scale.

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I've been a contractor for roughly a decade now and I can say that it's much better to be a generalist than a specialist. My personal skillset ranges from hard real-time embedded/bare metal work through desktop systems, GUIs and server side stuff with higher level languages. Even been learning some Clojure... I've never been without work in ten years and have always gone from one job to the next. In comparison, I know people who know only one area and they are a quite regularly 'between contracts'...

It's great when companies find someone who solves their exact problem, it sucks when you're the guy who can only solve one problem though.

Especially when someone finds a way to automate a solution.

I think Valve described the 'T' employee: know one area very deeply and a broad range of others reasonably well. Seems to be a good approach :)

Maybe another way of looking at what your friend said is to just be specific about your skills/experience when job seeking?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills

> Especially when someone finds a way to automate a solution.

But in our industry, what is been automated away? The only things I can think of are that if you were an expert, you'd be very well placed to leverage that automation.

How about diversifying then? Not in the sense of knowing everything shallowly. But in the sense of knowing like 5 things very deeply.

Icebraining's wiki link below hits it on the head, but my view is that knowing too much stuff deeply might make it hard to collaborate in teams as it makes roles really hard to define.

Happens in soccer a lot - teams with really versatile players will usually get whipped by teams who have specialists in each position. Top teams aim for squads with 2 players for every position, not 2 positions for every player.

Hope that makes sense, it's getting late here :)

Another important aspect of talking to a recruiter is there is a huge difference between

"I feel like getting a mysql dba job so my resume will portray me as a mysql DBA one tricky pony because I'm sick of writing Perl backends and Scala CRUD at this instant and don't feel comfortable enough with Clojure for paying work"

"OMG I really am a one trick pony who only knows one thing that being mysql"

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