81–90 of 231 posts
I'm usually jealous of a specialist for about 6 months to a year. Eventually I learn enough about what they do to lose interest and become jealous of a new specialist.
YES! :-( I'm in my 60's. Have worked as a contractor in effectively every field of IT and taught post-grad SE courses at university. I still program in C, Javascript and Python. Can design, build and configure data centers. Know most variants of Unix and its progeny, etc, etc. Yet ... I'm finding it very hard to get contract work post COVID. Recruiters are looking for 3-5 years experience with specific products. I de…
But maybe beyond a certain age you need to specialise simply in order to compete for positions.
Most employers are going to choose a younger more pliable (or cheaper) hire over someone who knows the same stuff but due to lived experience is less tolerant to bullshit.
YES! :-( I'm in my 60's. Have worked as a contractor in effectively every field of IT and taught post-grad SE courses at university. I still program in C, Javascript and Python. Can design, build and configure data centers. Know most variants of Unix and its progeny, etc, etc. Yet ... I'm finding it very hard to get contract work post COVID. Recruiters are looking for 3-5 years experience with specific products. I de…
Pro tip: you're not a generalist. A big chunk of specializing is how you package/market yourself. I consider myself a "full stack employee". I've done backend, frontend, hosted live events, some sales, marketing, a dash of HR, pretty much everything. Do I write that on my LinkedIn? Heck no. A year or so ago I looked at all the experience I had, saw I had a through-line story of how I've worked on video projects over…
I have noticed that when interviewing, the more specialized technical people often look down on full stack engineers, whereas managers are more excited about it. I consider myself full stack, but in my last role I presented myself as a frontend engineer, with some backend experience. Eventually this role just kinda expanded into both frontend and backend. Now that I do contract work, I present myself as whatever they…
Managers are excited about FS engineers simply because if they scoop up good ones, those who really know what they're doing -- masters of several areas of their stack -- they can rotate them effectively at a fraction of a cost, if not for free.
The best work I've done in my career has been at the intersection of two or three different areas that I've explored.
I see new skills and technologies as having a network effect with each other. I hoard them. Then every now and then I'll spot an opportunity to combine eg GitHub Actions and Playwright and Tesseract.js to do something really cool that I couldn't have done without prior experience in all three.
The reason? You can throw any problem at these people, and they will solve it without asking for a dedicated DNS guy, an extra front-ender or an LDAP guy. They can foresee obstacles and point out pitfalls around any technology. Not because they're experts in that specific tech field, but because they can generalise. If they say it's hard, management knows it's really hard. If they say it's stupid, management knows it's really stupid.
I never regretted anything. There were days when I felt the appeal of the prospect of knowing one single thing/tech really, really well, but for starters I met a bunch of those guys and they're really hard to work with. As soon as something happens outside their comfort zone ("I've never seen this before – what's a proxy?") they need help. Plus it's a risky approach – what if that tech becomes obsolete? There are a lot of old cobol developers out there that are more or less unemployable (at least as cobol developers).
I can provide perspective from both sides of the table, to add to the wonderful comments already posted. The first few years in my career were a will-do-anything attitude. So yes, like the OP, I did a bunch of different things. A few years in, I harbored similar thoughts of feeling inadequate. A jack-of-all-trades-but-master-of-none. Especially, since I was at Google and was surrounded by the best of the best and exp…
Pro tip: you're not a generalist. A big chunk of specializing is how you package/market yourself. I consider myself a "full stack employee". I've done backend, frontend, hosted live events, some sales, marketing, a dash of HR, pretty much everything. Do I write that on my LinkedIn? Heck no. A year or so ago I looked at all the experience I had, saw I had a through-line story of how I've worked on video projects over…
Also think about it from the company side:
Would you rather hire someone that solves your "exact" problem, or the one-man Army that -could- do everything? Which matters to you?