On Being a Generalist (opens in new tab)

> Some companies only hire specialists. If you’re Google, it makes little sense to hire a generalist, I think.

Having been through a Google interview and offer process, this seems exactly backwards: Google selects heavily for generalists, so that they have people who can adapt to and integrate different technologies. (I'm sure they do hire specialists in various areas, but their interview process optimizes for generalists.)

I’m a generalist and I would 100% recommend it over being a specialist because you get to see the whole picture. You start to notice patterns across different programming paradigms that make you a better developer. You learn techniques to quickly teach yourself and learn about the problem domain which translate into other parts of your life besides computers. I’ve taught myself how to work on cars using deductive logic when I get stuck and software engineering principles to make decisions when I’m afraid I might break something and I’ve improved my personal finances with data science.

I've been currently looking for employment and job descriptions nowadays are ridiculous. In one paragraph or section of a job description, they'll specifically state that they want a generalist, and in the very next section, they'll state explicitly that they want a specialist; just crazy.

Also, throughout my job history I've been more of a generalist; sort of like a modern day devops (but much broader in scope/responsibilities), and at least a decade before it was even an accepted term. And, almost for all of my jobs the hiring manager wants a specialist but "agrees to hire me EVEN THOUGH I seem to be more of a generalist" - as if they're doing me a favor...But in almost every job I've ever had, all of my bosses, stakeholders and peers/partners explicitly state that they're so glad that I'm on board (for a project, program, etc.) specifically because of my generalist nature...and they can't possibly have achieved their goals with a specialist, etc. No doubt, there are plenty of areas where specialists are absolutely essential, and really the only ones that could effectively complete what needs to be done. But, in my experience, soooo many, many people (of any seniority level, of any age, background, etc.) in positions of power (or at least positions of decision-making) suck royally at deciding when a good generalist is needed. There is some crazy cognitive dissonance out there.

Just remember the adage:

A specialist will tend to underestimate a generalist's ability to specialize, when they choose to focus on one thing; A generalist will tend to underestimate how deep any given specialty actually extends.

Google hires tons of generalists. The reasoning here is very flawed.

Hiring specialists is higher variance. They could be amazing for your company or it could be that you need to do something slightly different and they are mostly useless. Generalists are safer but with less upside.

Of course this dichotomy is false anyway. Everyone exists on a spectrum. No one has only a single skill at “max level” and no one has every skill. It’s more a question of where on the spectrum you want to be.

The word "generalist" tends to be used where "unspecialised" would've been more appropriate.

Junior, unspecialised engineers are exactly that: unspecialised. They haven't had the the time to become good at any one thing.

At the mid-weight range, some engineers start to focus on a particular area and become specialists. Others seek knowledge across the spectrum and become generalists. Finally, others remain unspecialised. The trend continues at the senior level.

I am most definitely a generalist, and don't bring as much depth to the table as my more specialised peers. But, when working on one layer of the stack, I can leverage my knowledge of the adjacent layers to produce something much more coherent. I can bridge the gap between two teams of specialists who don't understand each other and help them reach agreement. I'm pretty decent at helping product people figure out how all their moving pieces map to the various teams we have available.

These are just some of the things that generalists give you that specialists can't. To rebut the article's argument directly — I don't know about Google, but Facebook definitely explicitly hires generalists by the truckload.

I think the authors scope is way too narrow. If you’re a react developer who also knows vue, and perhaps enough ops to get side projects to run in Azure/AWS then you’re still a specialist. It’s easy to forget, because development is what we do, but it’s actually a rather specialist skill in itself. I say this as someone who has been part of several attempts at implementing things like RPA or even Sharepoint to non-developers, with a full expectation of genuinely smart people being capable of doing very simple drag and drop programming, and see them fail time and time again. Exactly because software development is a specialist field.

A generalist is someone who does software development, but also does project management and implementation (teaching users how to use software). Three distinct specialist fields, and this is where being a generalist can be valuable for your organisation. Because you get things done. But less beneficial to you, because no one wants generalists, and you’re likely doing 1.5 people’s job for 1 persons pay.

Practically speaking, as a developer applying to a startup, I'm going to say I'm a generalist and make a giant list of technologies and projects I've worked with. If applying at Bigco, I'm going to list the relevant specialties they're looking for and not confuse the poor person working in HR who has no idea what any of those technologies are. Specializing in all of the technologies the article listed isn't exactly a herculean feat.

If a position requires an actual specialist, a "We're forking Postgres and building a globally distributed database with acid transactions committed to all AWS regions without having to think about the topology of node deployment." kind of specialist, I'm not going to apply, and we've hit the point where you actually need to think about becoming a specialist.

As I get older, I'm learning that understanding technology is just the tip of the iceberg anyway. It doesn't matter how well engineered a solution is when Google Sheets solves 90% of the same problem for free with real time networking functionality. And that doesn't matter either, when ITAR restrictions keep you from using Google Sheets.

Often we cherish specialists quoting "Jack of all trades, master of none".

Curiously enough, the full version of the original has a twist:

“A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one."

https://www.theodysseyonline.com/7-phrases-youve-been-misquo...

This article is wildly wrong because effort and skill is non-linear.

I can be in the 90th percentile in a handful of areas if I'm a talented generalist. The effort needed after a certain point becomes exponential.

Truly, what is the difference between a React developer and a developer who can use React well? The latter can ALSO use other things? Under this framing, who would want to be the specialist?

And also, as others have mentioned, Google strongly prefers generalists for both practical and philosophical reasons. Internal mobility is high and they're just scooping up talent because they have more work than people. They often hire into a pool that is then matched to a team later. There is a reason their primary job posting is 'Location - Software Engineer'. They can't know what you'll do, so you must be good or learnable at everything. Finally, from a philosophical standpoint, strong generalists are cross-functional within their field and that's generally valued.

Tim Ferris has an interesting podcast on subject: https://tim.blog/2007/09/14/the-top-5-reasons-to-be-a-jack-o...

“Jack of all trades, master of many” and “specialization is for insects”

I have always preferred being a generalist since I tend to get bored quickly. Once you are a generalist you can build any side project you can think of without any external help.

It fascinates me how you can cover almost all of the software development landscape using just a couple of languages ( C# , Javascript and Java). C# runs on servers ( .NET core ), Desktop(WinForms and WPF), mobile platforms ( Xamarin Forms), Java runs well on servers and Android and Javascript can also be used on both servers(node) and clients(Apache Cordova for mobile support and Electron on Desktop). In my career I've worked with web development ( html/js frameworks, express ), databases(dynamodb and mysql), microservices(node, .net core, Sparkjava), Mobile( Android, Xamarin Forms, Windows phone and Blackberry) and even was an Engineering Manager for over 3 years. And all it took was to learn 3 languages.

One thing to watch out for if you want to be a generalist is feelings of inadequacy. Probably because you end up knowing something about a lot of things, you are very aware that people are better than you at each of those things. It can be tough.

However, I would still heartily recommend it. It's fun! You generally are learning how to make new things, rather than new ways to make the same things.

David Epstein's Range [0] is a great look into this seeming paradox of broad v. deep. The intro chapters of Tiger Woods with golf versus Roger Federer with tennis are the thesis: There are 'kind' learning environments and 'unkind' learning environments.

'Kind' learning environments are golf, chess, SAT prep, etc. Here, you just need to grind out the hours. The feedback is fairly quick and the objective is clear. You should specialize early on to grind out the time, like Tiger Woods.

'Unkind' learning environments are tennis, jazz, business, etc. Here you need a lot of general information to see weak patterns. You need to borrow from other domains and read a lot of unconnected stuff. The feedback is not timely and the objective is not clear. You should 'graze' on a lot of other things to become 'elite' in your chosen field. Roger Federer played a lot of sports before choosing tennis 'late' in life.

The book is very detailed yet readable, a great targeting at a general audience. The section on music is fascinating reading.

Generalist or specialist bents are both good ideas, but it depends on the environment.

[0] https://davidepstein.com/the-range/

The conversation is missing a dimension: How big can the domain be? One can be a specialist in JavaScript, for example. But you could just as well say you specialize in React or Vue, as the article says. A React developer might say person who does all JavaScript is a generalist; the JavaScript developer could point to a full stack engineer and say "that's an actual generalist".

The opaqueness makes it difficult to discuss the topic further.

There are layers of each problem space that benefit from optimization and good design more than others, however, most solutions still need all the other layers to be useful. I've had extreme success being a data generalist at a mid-sized analytics company because I was able to be the one to fill in all the gaps of a project, e.g if there are 10 steps that need to be completed, the generalist can do 7 of them and the specialists can do a great job on those other 3. This is the magic of human collaboration after all! On the flip side, I've found that working alone I miss having the specialists. While I know I can technically achieve all the steps, what I really want is the context the specialists can add. Those bits of code or math that turn a vanilla engineered solution into a nuanced piece of software. My conclusion is that collaboration between generalists and specialists is important but asymmetric. Generalists need context and information from specialists so they can become semi-specialists, while specialists simply need generalist infrastructure to power their ideas.

Knowing only React, or one programming language doesn't make you a specialist. It just means you have very little knowledge and/or experience. What's next? "if statement developer"?

Software engineering as a whole, is one specialization. Maaaybe backend vs fronted could be made into two meaningful specializations. Or "distributed systems", "game development", "financial systems" etc areas. But not one framework/ PL. Come on. :D

I don't want to bash on people who actually only know one language/framework. It's OK, it can pay your bills, etc. Maybe you also have great skills and interests in non-software areas. But just don't fool yourself thinking "I'm a React specialist".

Be T-shaped: a jack of all trades, but a master of some.

Think of a specialist as putting all your eggs in one basket, high risk high reward ratio. Generalist is like investing in an index, can’t go wrong most times, but you won’t hit any home runs

The main assumption of this post is that humans have limited resources to store and compute knowledge. This is shortsighted. Polymaths, though rare, are an example that excellence can be achieved in many domains. Even in the “normal” range of human capability, there are many roles that are designed for a generalist. Healthcare is the prime example. You can’t have specialists handling primary care because they can’t see the human body holistically, but as an instance of what they have specialized into. Product management is also a domain you can’t put specialists in charge. You need people who can translate user / customer needs into technical specifications and even between specialists so they can understand the tasks to be done (think health analytics or other interdisciplinary activities). You also need to be able to understand all faces of a problem to provide an efficient solution. Sometimes you need someone sufficiently unattached to kill features and products that are no longer financially viable. Startup founders, although technical, end up doing everything because of financial constraints. In this case the “regression” towards generalism is a survival skill. IMO, generalists are skilled people who have the ability to learn and adapt faster than the average people and are able to provide reasonable solutions.

There's nothing stopping you from being both broad and deep. Be an expert on a few things, knowledgeable on more, and familiar with many more, and grow all of those sets over time.

I'm a generalist I guess.

How did I get to be a generalist. Because I was a very narrow specialist at one point and people asked me to do other things that were outside the specialty and I learned to do them.

I kept doing that and learning different things as I moved between jobs as a bit of necessity.

My original specialty won't get me hired anymore. there isn't enough requirement for it.

I have several skills under my general skill set that I am better at than most specialists in those skills I work with because despite their being specialized inside that one skill I have been doing it longer and deeper than them. But I am a generalist.

I know I'm a generalist because a top consultant recruiting company asked me a couple weeks ago to cut out most of my skills from their database while they were trying to sell me to a client because those skills had nothing to do with the assignment and they made me look like a generalist.

Basically the company wanted a front end developer with React skills. I don't know what they think I've been doing the last 20 years if that's supposed to be my only skill. Being a specialist I suppose.

I'm a fairly capable generalist. For many years I struggled with pretty real imposter syndrome. It's a lot better recently, and it certainly helps to work with people who can remind you it's a strength - but being a young person without a precise specialism in a room with 'specialists' I found very hard, regardless of my abilities or what I could offer.

I guess it's very daunting to be sat across a table with the head of something (a person with a supposed very deep subject knowledge), when you think at any moment they'll say "what are you doing here?" It took a long time to realise that even if my depth of knowledge was not the same as theirs, having an understanding of things outside of what they knew could often change the direction of the conversation and how they (and the business) would approach things.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who's felt this way. If you're there right now - stick with it, everything gets easier!

Being a great specialist commands a premium but can be tricky as niches can evaporate and then you are master of nothing.

Being a generalist can be tricky as you do not have a differentiating factor making it harder to get hired into highly paid jobs but easier to adapt.

People and communication skills are often more important than any of this but hiring in our industry is sadly keyword driven. As a very broad generalist I found myself in a fairly turbulent corporate environment. It should have been easy to get the jobs I wanted but it did not work so well - what I got were firefighting jobs leading to more firefighting jobs. I adopted now a portfolio of related technology and skills as my core and am marketing them actively. Works much better in getting work I like. It does not change who I am but it helps to get the tasks I want and also give me the platform to say no to things outside of the portfolio.

There's something about granularity this blog does not touch. For an outsider it is extremely specialist to know design, marketing, developing and a bit of server admin.

I'd say generalists split their time across software development, composing music, and competitive sailing. Or at least something along these lines of diversity.

My experience suggests that successful organisations need a good mixture of specialists and generalists to be successful – although "specialists" is maybe the wrong term, and it's more about having a team with a diverse set of skills in different areas.

It's beneficial to have individuals that have a broad understanding of how complex systems work without necessarily being able to develop all of the components in full themselves; there's equally a requirement for developers who are capable of understanding and implementing all the detailed intricacies of particular fields, like front-end or embedded code. The former are usually able to develop working solutions to a given problem, but they often end up being sub-optimal; the latter can often implement those solutions more effectively, but can struggle to effectively work with a broader system.

This idea is related to Cringely's military analogy about the different kinds of personalities and skillsets needed to build companies – the "commandos", the "infantry", and the "police". The "commandos" can move quickly to build creative or disruptive solutions to complex problems, but can leave unfinished tasks in their wake, and get bored easily. The "infantry" build on top of the work of the "commandos" – refining, improving, and professionalising. But they need more infrastructure, process, and understanding to do this, which can slow them down. And the "police" are there to manage the system when the speed of development slows down – the focus is on maintenance, economy of scale, and more-stable-if-less-exciting work.

It's all a bit of a thin metaphor to be sure, but I've definitely seen these and similar personalities in different companies, all offering different kinds of value. Nobody belongs exclusively to one group, in the same way that nobody is exclusively a generalist or specialist. But I've found that understanding how different personalities and "skill shapes" can contribute is important for building an effective and productive team.

In the summer I will finish my MBA and I consider myself a generalist. I never had a real focus during my bachelor and my master studies and now I am a little bit afraid that this could result in problems finding a job.

Unless it's for a highly specialized role, generalists with some stronger attributes always seems like the appropriate way to go. We hired a network engineer to handle our entire global network, spanning hundreds of offices in many countries. He really knows his shit, but his ignorance of most anything else in the world is offering staggering. To the point we're not sure if he's just trying to be an instigator of stupidity. He truly is a one trick pony, but is very good at the trick. The rest of us handle everything else for him, including how to catch a train.

> You’re a generalist if you know and use React, but also know Vue, you can design a page in Figma and translate that design into a React component with CSS. Plus, you also know how to deploy an application to Heroku.

Uhh… A generalist is someone like Toby Fox, who can design a game, code it, make the art, compose the music, and write all the dialogue; not someone who can use several barely-different flavors of webshit.

"If you’re Google, it makes little sense to hire a generalist, I think."

I'm a Googler and a generalist. This is of course just my opinion.

In the two roles I've had, being a generalist is far better than being specialized: as a Product Manager and as a founder on a new project.

A big part of being a PM is being the connective tissue between specialist ICs and silo'd organizational structures. A joke is that we are 'failed engineers' but many of us just got equally interested in UX, entrepreneurship, and business strategy as code. We end up not being the expert in any of these. But we are pretty well qualified to coordinate among them. I.e. our strength is we're generalists. It's a bit like the nervous system that coordinates the heart and lungs and other specialist organs.

I'm now in a part of the company (Area 120) dedicated to funding new projects and businesses. The shape of the talent needs are very much like an external startup. We're headcount limited to 3-5 per project, so we really need people who can design and code, develop sales pipelines and do product management, "full stack" engineers and so forth. These people are super valuable where I am, because they are generalists.

I think anywhere entrepreneurial will need many generalists. I believe think Amazon has this culture too.

This also why I can create a lot more value in a company like this than if I was an individual contractor. I see comments on HN sometimes along the lines of "companies must be underpaying you, because if the value of your labor wasn't greater than your pay, they wouldn't make any profit." This is correct in a very narrow sense but missing the hugely important piece that the value I can produce embedded in a large organization is much, much greater than I can as a singleton (because I'm a generalist). As a rough example, maybe as a contractor I can create $100/hour worth of value and for the sake of argument can capture nearly all of that. Because whatever discrete task I'm hired for I'm Ok but not world class at it. But in a company like Google, I am leveraging huge assets and connecting them. If I identify opportunities and coordinate execution between (for example) specialist orgs like Search and Maps, the value I can create is massive because of the size of the levers. It's nearly unbounded but could easily be worth 1000s of dollars an hour. So if they pay me $200, everyone wins. The pie is grown, by being an embedded generalist, and I'm still doing better off than I would independently (even if my employer captures a bunch of the value I produced – which is fair, since they also provided the levers).

I see it less as "being a generalist" and more as "being a specialist at learning new things".

In October 2019 I delivered a keynote at PyConZA arguing that you should aim to be a generalist that connects specialists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn06eCDur2o

In short: in sparse graphs, mobility dominates.

I think being a generalist is definitely a value. In a near future, specialists will be substituted by artificial intelligence (AI). Generalists, instead, will stay at their place, since they do what AI (currently) can't: making connections.

I thought I was generalist until I noticed that some skills I claimed to have, I hadn’t actually used in a decade or longer. Do I really still know that stuff? How many problems I had to deal with are resolved?

I think perhaps I am instead a serial specialist.

When I was at the earliest stages of my first startup, I learned how dangerously unproductive a specialist can be as a first hire.

Now, with my second startup, I see how important and impactful specialists are as the complexity and size of our tasks have grown.

Surely all specialists in tech end up as generalists eventually. If you were a jQuery specialist 10 years ago, you've pivoted to something else by now. How many times does that need to happen before you become more general than special?

There's a good recent book about being a generalist https://davidepstein.com/the-range/

Being a generalist is a luxury given mostly to people who can't do anything better than not enough. And more often than not, this means managing specialists ..

As marketing generalist, I can tell you I have been heavily penalized in career searches for not having specific skillsets

I think the most rewarding path is becoming a specialist in something very important and broadly applicable.

I've seen people on hn describe themselves as "serial specialists". (However, nobody admits to being a "parallel generalist".)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22337342

>I'm a generalist too, or as someone else put it - a serial specialist. You could just stagnate until you retire. That's basically what I'm doing, but for slightly different reasons.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22335697

>Something i learned about myself a little bit farther in was that I wasn’t a generalist so much as I was a serial specialist (once you haven’t touched something you used the be good at for seven years, can you still claim to be good at it? Turns out I can’t).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4317080

>Going for knowledge just because it sounds cool isn't going to be a motivator strong enough for success. Find stuff you're interested in and dive into those. The way to become a well-rounded person is to become obsessive in many things (possibly not simultaneously) that are unusual in some way. In fact, learning anything will feel like specialization, and in fact being a serial specialist is probably the most viable way to become a "Renaissance man" today.

>Note that the first thing that came to my mind when I read your post was: "To be a true Renaissance man, you need to have been dead for 400 years". I won't write it here :)

The Church of the Subgenius has a similar concept called the "Short Duration Personal Savior" (or ShorDurPerSav, the proper Tibetian term):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10045688

>Wow; just wow. Thank you for filling that gaping hole in my education with Dick Tuck [1] [2]! My new short duration personal savior [2].

http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/goods/shordurpersavs/X0012_...

>From: Purple Kitty <pkitty@netcom.com>

>-= SHORT DURATION PERSONAL SAVIORS - A LESSON =-

>BEGINNER LEVEL - CLEARED FOR ALL BOBBIES - BEGINNER LEVEL - CLEARED FOR

>Shockingly, some Bobbies are still unclear as to what a Short Duration Personal Savior is. The concept of the Short Duration Personal Savior (or ShorDurPerSav, the proper Tibetian term) is a new one-- traditional religions tend to emphasize "unwavering servitude" over convenience. But is absolute devotion to one savior always best? Buddha is a wonderful role model for certain aspects of life, but when that po'bucker shoves you out of the way as he walks by, don't you wish that you worshipped George Foreman instead, if only for the next few minutes?

>Well, you can! The Church of the SubGenius heartily endorses the concept of disposable saviors, or ShorDurPerSavs. Choose your messiah to fit the situation. If peace and compassion are what you need right now, follow the teachings of Gandhi. Later, when you need to cut a business deal, emulate the wisdom of Sam Walton. When you need a witty remark on the spot, let Samuel Clemens into your heart to inspire you. And when you need Slack in your life, sell your soul to "Bob".

>"Bob" is the most frequently invoked of our infinitely varied Short Duration Personal Saviors, with good reason. He has Slack--he IS Slack. He symbolizes the "easy life", where one follows the Path of Least Resistance and gains Slack effortlessly. But no one is expected to worship "Bob" 24/7! If you're trying to get that PC to work, choosing "Bob" as your ShorDurPerSav will hinder you far more than helping you! "Bob" couldn't use a PC if he wanted to (though he sold more of them last year than IBM and Packard Bell put together)! Read through Stephen Levy's _Hackers_ and let the TMRC be your ShorDurPerSavs! There ARE no limits!

Personally, I'm a generalist in the worst sense in that I've read about a lot and can talk for day about various things, but am only proficient in one or two things.

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