On the flip side few reasons why I don’t favor generalist profiles (while being one myself).
- resumes which claim generalist tend to be SEO’ed than real, or AI generated and they will say experience dozens of technologies most of which would be untrue, throw everything and see what sticks .
In most cases it just tells me what they have heard of rather than what they know especially if they are not very senior .
- It takes really hard effort to be beyond a superficial generalist, even when they know some of those skills and remember them during an interview it is not with a lot of depth they pursued only in passing interest not in a professional capacity (that is fine, but it is a lot work to make the distinction in evaluation on all relevant skills in a timed interview)
- It is harder or simply not viable for a specialist to interview a generalist , so you need to have few to hire more . If you don’t have any or they are not doing interviews you are not going get more .
- Being a generalist with depth of understanding means you are the type of person who needs to understand things properly before doing them . .You are lot of time learning things which are not required for get the task completed.
That means either you need are prepared to spend a lot of personal time and be perpetually stressed or be slow in completing something .
It is hard thing to master to let it go . I don’t think I have learned it yet
- Complexity and depth of technologies change a lot in short duration when they are corporate backed .
I learned Linux architecture or vim or git 20 years ago they haven’t changed much. You can be productive in any of these to stacks very quickly even if you didn’t use them for years .
Last I worked on android or swift is more than few years ago . I doubt I could even build a serious app without spending major time . To be productive to learning curve is steep and the prior knowledge is limited in usefulness.
>Being a generalist with depth of understanding means you are the type of person who needs to understand things properly before doing them . .You are lot of time learning things which are not required for get the task completed.
It's just how my career swung me. I would have loved to have developed as a subject matter expert, but everytime I get into the swing of things, layoffs came around or the studio shut down. Now I'm freelancing and that by nature requires a generalist approach.
no one's really investing in specialists, so I have no idea how the millentials/Gen Z of the world will ever get to properly specialize. Specialization requires time to master something, and that time implies stability to do that thing.
>To be productive to learning curve is steep and the prior knowledge is limited in usefulness.
business wise, sure. It's a shame all business sees as "productive" is based on how many widgets you churn in that time. It's no surprise such companies want to force AI into it without quality considerations.
> Being a generalist with depth of understanding means you are the type of person who needs to understand things properly before doing them . .You are lot of time learning things which are not required for get the task completed.
Ha, I feel seen. Though also I wouldn't frame this quite so negatively. I've seen a lot of tasks "completed" by people who just got the job done without fully understanding it and they frequently get it done badly.
Generalist over here as well, that is kind of what pushed me to boring fields, UNIX, Windows, Java, .NET, C++, vanilajs,...
Changes also happen, but they are kind of glacial with areas where we are hunting the new shinny every here.
Usually I tend to be a laggard on the adoption graph, the large majority of stuff hardly makes the curve, and I have better things to do with my time.
Plus that vintage stuff that isnt' cool to write blog posts about, usually pays good enough.
Stuff like Android or iDevices suffer from yearly fashion, platform owners feel compeled to reboot the development experience every year, forcing app developers to keep up, and also as means to sell new devices.
- resumes which claim generalist tend to be SEO’ed than real, or AI generated and they will say experience dozens of technologies most of which would be untrue, throw everything and see what sticks .
In most cases it just tells me what they have heard of rather than what they know especially if they are not very senior .
- It takes really hard effort to be beyond a superficial generalist, even when they know some of those skills and remember them during an interview it is not with a lot of depth they pursued only in passing interest not in a professional capacity (that is fine, but it is a lot work to make the distinction in evaluation on all relevant skills in a timed interview)
- It is harder or simply not viable for a specialist to interview a generalist , so you need to have few to hire more . If you don’t have any or they are not doing interviews you are not going get more .
- Being a generalist with depth of understanding means you are the type of person who needs to understand things properly before doing them . .You are lot of time learning things which are not required for get the task completed.
That means either you need are prepared to spend a lot of personal time and be perpetually stressed or be slow in completing something .
It is hard thing to master to let it go . I don’t think I have learned it yet
- Complexity and depth of technologies change a lot in short duration when they are corporate backed .
I learned Linux architecture or vim or git 20 years ago they haven’t changed much. You can be productive in any of these to stacks very quickly even if you didn’t use them for years .
Last I worked on android or swift is more than few years ago . I doubt I could even build a serious app without spending major time . To be productive to learning curve is steep and the prior knowledge is limited in usefulness.