On Being a Generalist

I second. Most data and anecdata says you need to be a solid generalist software engineer to be hired at Google. You may have some specialty (the vast majority don't), but a single area of expertise won't take you there.

Vide the famous tweet (https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768):

"Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off."

To be clear, I think that Google has a reason for that:

- They use standardized hiring procedure (they need to work at a scale).

- A startup/software/machine learning whizz kind won't be useful (or would be dangerous) if they contributed code that does not meet other software enginering criteria.

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.

I don’t agree that you need to pick one and identify with it forever. Look, we are paid to solve problems by communicating with people and then building things on the computer. There are a lot of ways that can look, no need to limit your options like this.

There are so many posts on here pontificating on what exactly a senior developer is, or whether you should call yourself a programmer, and on and on. I don’t see the point of painstakingly choosing the exact right label for yourself. It’s always possible to learn and adapt and do something new.

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.

I think you're focusing too much on the strict semantics of "generalist" - whether the word is accurate or not will largely depend on context and how much you "zoom out".

I could argue with you that someone who does development, project management and implementation is still a software specialist, and that a real generalist is someone who can sell, or someone who can play piano, as well as do the aforementioned.

I am a freelance tech consultant or run what you could call a microagency... Sometimes I design or code my own projects, whereas others I outsource them and act as a project manager. I deal with my own marketing and sales, successfully so, as I've gotten projects at really big companies by pitching against agencies orders of magnitude my size.

In my case, being a generalist pays well, and it's actually the only way forward in terms of growth. The scenario where I could see myself being useful to others is as a co-founder or as others have said, in certain small or medium businesses.

But I otherwise generally agree that companies of a certain size only think they want generalists but they don't put their money where their mouth is.

I was interviewing for product manager positions some time ago, and I got the impression that interviewers didn't care about my generalist skills (designing, coding, marketing) - they just wanted someone who had done... exactly product management, with very similar responsibilities to the position at stake. I have "Product Manager" in my CV, but some time in the past and often in somewhat different scopes (the role's definition is quite loose) to the hiring companies, putting me at a severe disadvantage in the hiring game.

I always think that being a generalist is entirely possible, but you have to be ready to carve out your place in a world that is mostly built for specialists.