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Prove me wrong! The tech industry needs more generalists than specialists.
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Top comments (4)
btw -I like the below billboard about :"Thank you for being supportive of code newbies!!
I have always been a proponent for specialisation.
JavaScript only and thats it!!!!!
This whole thing of companies and their dumb recruiters listing technologies that they themselves do not know and you will never use and they don't use is very annoying.
And i feel like it is very thinning of us as a community in skill growth and development.
It is not like learning a new language like french or Portuguese. Tech languages are forever growing and developing and how are you gonna be on top of things when you have to be on top of twenty languages and all their frameworks...
How are you gonna be a master of them ?
Or is it okay to be a jerk of all trades??
Would you like a dentist who is a physician, lab assistant, oncologist sometimes a taxi driver?
That is the idea that i think is happening in tech. it needs to be reigned in..
That is my five cents
Jonathan Stark speak of the three roles you can have :
Robot vs Technician vs Fixer
jonathanstark.com/the-cab-ride
I prefer that to "generalists vs specialists" because the fixer is the specialist of his clients, not of a tool, and that's much more powerful.
If you are a junior, you start as a robot, doing whatever comes to your desk.
Huge bureaucracies like the GAFAM, banking and insurance companies, tend to hire Technicians that work on a narrow task like "you are the guy who manages the Kubernetes servers" or something. Which is clearly an improvment.
But to me that's not the best you can do, the best you can do is to become a problem solver, a fixer.
When I became independant, I understood that what matters is that I answer the needs of my clients.
My client does not care that I am the best at Kotlin.
Those are just tools I may or may not use, my loyalty is not towards them but towards my client.
Clients do not care about your solutions, they care that I solve their problems by whatever means make sense.
I believe we achieved the level of abstraction in some areas that can let generalists work on projects while maintaining a bigger picture in their heads. Although as mentioned in this blogpost: developmentgeek.com/20170408/speci... It is best to be "specialized generalist" and have solid breadth and depth of knowledge.
I think at some point it needs to balance for both generalist and specialists