51–60 of 103 posts
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> I'd add public sector work to that list Unfortunately, working your ass off for $40k and a questionably managed pension doesn't put food on the table.
Not every nation on earth underpays their public sector workers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'd add public sector work to that list Unfortunately, working your ass off for $40k and a questionably managed pension doesn't put food on the table.
Not every nation on earth underpays their public sector workers.
For the kind of work I do, being a jack of all trades/generalist is actually VERY valuable and I would like to think my team sees that value. But it’s definitely difficult to explain to people who don’t know me who see all my peers who have specific technologies focus areas, and then I’m the chick who knows a lot about a lot of things, has seen a lot, but obviously isn’t going to be as strong as someone who has spent years focusing on one area.
I might be off-base here, but I often think of people who are jack of all trades types as ideal connectors. Or, at least I am. I can connect the right people/teams together and can often identify problems/solutions by asking the right kinds of questions that can help a specialist hone in on something.
That connector/conduit piece is something incredibly beneficial at a large company, when the product engineering teams, the UX teams, the marketing teams, and the sales teams aren’t always in sync (particularly if something is cross product or cross organization). By being familiar with so many different people/roles and being good at identifying where there are opportunities to work together, that’s been a good fit for me, as I get to work on lots of different things and once and spend time with lots of different teams.
That said, I do echo what others have suggested, which is to go for a specialized type of role and then either express your strengths for cross-org work or agility in the interview or try to carve out the role once you’re in the job. A good generalist is typically identified early on and in my experience, we get slotted into that role by others, often without trying.
The more difficult thing, I’ve found, is getting promoted. I’m close to making principal and I would have already been promoted if I was focused on one area. That’s frustrating, because obviously I can do that, but doing that offers less value to the company. But I want to get promoted, so I’m working out how to play that game, while also still being a jack of all trades, even if my title is more focused/specific.
I also avoid working with really early stage founders as my rates are high.
Write content that will attract founders.
Good luck
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People are finally starting to realize that benefits are orthogonal to the mission of the company and should be replaced with increased base salaries instead. If the company spends $X on processing your $Y benefit for a year, your salary would increase by $X + $Y, and you would just (optionally) sign up into whatever programs are available to you, without much of a UX change.
I'm no expert, but I have a hard time believing the economics are this simple. Take health insurance: I'd imagine employers are buying plans offering per-employee costs lower than if each employee were paying for their own insurance. Economies of scale, bargaining power (at least when it comes to larger firms), etc. Perhaps at some firms the processing costs really do outweigh the savings, but I would expect this to…
Or a "Solution Engineer" at an enterprise software/services company could be a fit. This is a role where you may not be working on the core platform, but custom solutions for clients built on top of the platform (hence PM, UX type skills are useful). Sometimes this is in service of sales pitches, other times you are actually implementing the solution.
I have hired for roles like this in enterprise world, but also even for internal platforms at a FANG, i've setup something similar before.
I myself am a sort of jack of all trades for ~20 years now and am a senior engineering manager at a FANG--I've never considered myself to be a particularly strong engineer, but I made up for it in other ways and am technical "enough" to be effective (at least people seem to think so). I've seen others like me be successful (e.g. they are more senior than me now), and some did not even have technical backgrounds, they just "faked it till they made it", but had a good sense of what was important to focus on and not be distracted by technical ratholes.
Like others said, a startup is a good option too--I have been in that type of role in several startups earlier in my career (and have had to hire those types of people before).
good luck!
Startup CTO?
I'm mostly happy, but my real fear now is - what next?
I'm in the same boat, inside any given org I can tangibly feel that "jack of all trades" is in huge demand... and I find myself working long hours due to internal demand for this role inside companies. Like you, in my 20 years doing this type of role (wearing a large variety of different title hats) I've never been HIRED to the role. This feels odd, given playing the role always keeps me in high demand internally to…
Same here. I started as a webmaster.
> The problem is there's a similar appearing archetype to "jack of all trades" the "always reading never doing" person.
A good metric I used is to check their Github profile. I believe a "doer" jack of all trades will have to experiment often.
But I agree that they are really really hard to find!
> But even if they spent serious time using a technology, they still need 4 hrs of work in it to look surface competent again
This is true, and even more so when you switch between very different fields. For example, I must admit that it takes a little while to go from a UX design "period" using Figma all day to a DevOps "period" to build AMI's and navigate through AWS (which is a FT job in itself!). And the more fields/subfields you practice, the more likely you are not practicing one for a while; so the time switching becomes a burden and comes with an overwhelming feeling.
On the other hand, Jack of all trades have an incredible advantage in seeing the big picture and visualize the intersection of each field at a very deep level.
For example, a marketer with engineering knowledge will think of growth hacking strategies a specialist marketer would never think of. Or a designer with engineering knowledge can design UI's that can be built efficiently.