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Ask HN: Is it OK to not have a “thing”?

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Re: Ask HN: Is it OK to not have a “thing”?

#21

Post by aristofun »

What really helped me in similar situation is to find one common thing that drove me to all 100 different jobs and hobbies I’ve changed through my life.

What is a single most valuable thing was there for me?

Not money, fame or generic socially conditioned stuff.

But uniquely mine thing that I found there.

And for me the answer was “the process of creating something new”.

(For my wife it was “fixing things”, she likes to fix people as a psychologist and even fix our dinner :)

As simple as that!

And thanks god I’m smart and flexible enough to create something new either on stage as an actor or in my Mac as a developer.

And I don’t care about all those employers who miss my point.

There’re always like minded people out there.

Re: Ask HN: Is it OK to not have a “thing”?

#22

Post by acesubido »

> Apart from saying you're a "generalist", how do you best sell yourself when you don't have a specialisation or a specific area you are focused on?

"I have a talent and process for evaluating new technologies at a systematic pace. This will allow me to produce the necessary POC that would help you to decide if a piece of new tech is the right fit for your business problem."

Usually that's the job description of an Enterprise Architect or a Solutions Architect. They usually start coding stuff for a POC, or put in initial devops tools/processes, dabble with new tech but not deep enough to be a specialist.

Re: Ask HN: Is it OK to not have a “thing”?

#23

Post by bhub »

acesubido wrote: post #22

> Apart from saying you're a "generalist", how do you best sell yourself when you don't have a specialisation or a specific area you are focused on? "I have a talent and process for evaluating new technologies at a systematic pace. This will allow me to produce the necessary POC that would help you to decide if a piece of new tech is the right fit for your business problem." Usually that's the job description of an E…

That's a really good description of what I tend to do a lot of the time. I do enjoy playing with and evaluating "things" but rarely get to the point of "expert" with them before the next shiny thing comes in. I had some reservations about posting this question, but given the really helpful and insightful replies I've had, I'm glad I did. Thanks

Re: Ask HN: Is it OK to not have a “thing”?

#24

Post by quickthrower2 »

airbreather wrote: post #14

Your "thing" is that you can learn new things as required. It's actually the ultimate thing. Those other guys with a thing like, say, SQL or LAMP or maybe java etc etc, they can't learn totally new things, or they would.

Well it depends how you name things - you could spend a lifetime in just Java and always be learning things getting deeper. But if they are all under the general banner “Java” it just might not seem that way.
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