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Generalists vs specialists – Who has a greater chance of success? (2019)

abhijitbhaduri.com

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Re: Generalists vs specialists – Who has a greater chance of success? (2019)

#111

Post by scruple »

tmotwu wrote: post #107
scruple wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a very good friend who leaned into C++ hard about 10 years ago. He's now sitting on one of the languages sub-committees. I think he'll never have any shortage of employment opportunities doing work that he finds interesting. At the same time, I leaned into Ruby hard. I'm now leading a team that writes JavaScript and, quite frankly, I do not have the same confidence. I'm not even confident that I'll be writing…

Interesting perspective. I'm on the other end of the coin. Work with mostly C++. Looking at job boards, there are endless opportunities for Ruby and JavaScript positions, not so much for C++ these days. JavaScript will probably be fine for as long as the web exists.

There's a lot of churn in projects / jobs but also in tooling, ecosystem, etc...

I've written web applications in: Ruby, Python, C#, Elixir, and JavaScript in the last 5 years alone. I could technically add Lua to that list, too.

I can get a job done, even jobs that are fairly complex, and sometimes (I'd wager I'm batting 0.500 for whatever that's worth) those projects do have long legs... But I don't have the sort of depth of skill or command of language and specific tooling that I expected to have at this point in my career. That is what feeds into my feelings.

Re: Generalists vs specialists – Who has a greater chance of success? (2019)

#112

Post by mywittyname »

musingsole wrote: post #102
strgcmc wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably the only way that anything gets done though. Someone has to keep the legacy system running, warts and all, while someone else has the free space to work on something better. The only thing that's misguided is comparing the two as if they were tasked with the same goal (they were not). But, one can speculate that if the situation was reversed, and the interns and newbies were forced to maintain the ol…

Richard Hamming talks of the development of FORTRAN and Algol in his History of Computers talk. He recalls FORTRAN being received as something between an abomination and a stupid trick. Algol, in contrast, was backed by many international groups and is described as "an attempt by the theoreticians to greatly improve FORTRAN" (by way of all their great, formalized knowledge and 'wisdom'). The seasoned experts always t…

People who have been in the trenches for years tend to have difficulty ignoring the current system and its limitations when building a replacement. So they end up rebuilding the same product over again.

I've seen it a lot and have been on both sides. Newly created teams have a massive advantage when it comes to replacing existing systems because they avoid getting bogged down in the details. However, they do invariably miss implementing key features in the new system, leading to a situation where the new system is better than the old one only 80-90% of the time.

Re: Generalists vs specialists – Who has a greater chance of success? (2019)

#113

Post by EricE »

irjustin wrote: post #9
planet-and-halo wrote: post #2

The best thing I ever read on this topic came from biology. In "The Diversity of Life," E.O. Wilson describes how specialist species thrive in stable environments. The stability allows them to evolve "deeply" into a niche and outcompete any species less specialized for that same niche. So if I'm really great at plucking fruit from tall trees, and you suck at it, I win. In unstable environments, however—say all of tho…

I've had a going theory on this - that it's a yoyo between generalization and specialization. A particular topic starts with generalists but as time progresses and stability (i.e. a path worth pursuing) becomes apparent, specialization is needed to eek out more performance gains. Then after a while, that particular area gets disrupted because there's a fundamental shift in landscape and the cycle repeats because the…

The key is right their in evolution - adaptation.

These days I’m far less interested in what skills someone has. I’m far more interested to see if they have a track record of being able to adapt to changing circumstances. I’d much rather have someone who has shown they can adapt - or better still, will embrace the chaos openly :)

You don’t want to have everyone like that - you need a few “slow and steady wins the race” types to keep fundamental stuff going too. But I know which side of that equation I’d rather be on :)

Re: Generalists vs specialists – Who has a greater chance of success? (2019)

#115

Post by screye »

I am a generalist to the extreme, and I kind of hate it.

* For non-job stuff I am a human encyclopedia. Within tech, I am quite resourceful when it comes to the meta, but am never the go-to person for a particular task.

* Did MechE -> CS -> ML.... so have a generalists technical education.

* I have done meaty projects in all of Vision, NLP, ML for systems, Computational social science, HealthML at production/publishable levels.

* I am great a public speaker and have been recommended to do go down the MBA rabbit hole by many people. But, I am too well meaning to play office politics.

The constant feeling of imposter syndrome despite countless assurances becomes grating after a while. The only exception is cooking, and man does it feel good to KNOW that you are good at something. My greatest phobia in life is to be an "all bark, no bite" sort of person. I find anything and everything exciting, so my affliction seems to be permanent.

But, if anyone is in my position; hunker down and get yourself a specialization: a safe space. It will take 2-5 years of full-time work on the exact thing, but then there comes what I presume is a strong sense of competence that you never need to question. After that you have your whole life to generalize. Might be a grass is greener on the other side situation, but my 2 cents.

Re: Generalists vs specialists – Who has a greater chance of success? (2019)

#116

Post by ghaff »

jbluepolarbear wrote: post #17
Snoozle wrote: post #3

I always feel like these types of posts are too kind to generalists. Maybe that's just because I am one and I am falling for the greener grass. It's true I've done well in my career, but I've never felt particularly competent. I can do a half assed job as a manager, developer, product owner, and salesman, but I am not any better at those tasks than someone who specializes in doing those things. I could argue that I h…

I guess it’s perspective, I’m a career long generalist and I feel confident that I can be put on any team and preform at or better than the average specialist in the same position. I’ve backed this up with every position I’ve had and have built a network of people that know and trust when I say I can do something. I think that’s more important than any specialist because if I don’t know an answer or how to solve some…

It's also something of a continuum. I was an IT industry analyst working for a small firm. This made me acutely aware of consciously picking a point on that continuum. We definitely tended to be more generalist than analysts at big firms who knew narrow areas inside out--and therefore we were better at drawing connections between different topics. By the same token, we needed to be narrow enough to have genuinely deeper knowledge about some set of related technology areas than a more casual observer would have.

I still do something similar within a vendor today and I do find myself having to consciously tell myself "It's OK not to understand much about $X technology area."

Re: Generalists vs specialists – Who has a greater chance of success? (2019)

#117

Post by ghaff »

tjs8rj wrote: post #104
Snoozle wrote: post #3

I always feel like these types of posts are too kind to generalists. Maybe that's just because I am one and I am falling for the greener grass. It's true I've done well in my career, but I've never felt particularly competent. I can do a half assed job as a manager, developer, product owner, and salesman, but I am not any better at those tasks than someone who specializes in doing those things. I could argue that I h…

Another way of thinking about this is absolute returns vs risk-adjusted returns. Maybe as a specialist you’d have higher absolute returns, but the probability that your speciality dies may mean your risk adjusted returns are higher for generalists.

You didn't want to be the go-to Y2K guy in 2001. Or the world performance expert in some now obsolete computer architecture.

Re: Generalists vs specialists – Who has a greater chance of success? (2019)

#118

Post by bsldld »

I don't know where I read this, but few years ago someone was advising students on what they should do to survive professionally. And the answer he gave was:

Master one field, and that advise would have been enough for past generations. But for the present and coming generations the answer is, master one field but have at least some knowledge of other(2-3) fields that you think(from your general knowledge) are important for humanity; and don't let go of your hobby. This is a not so clear-cut answer because that is the reality we live in, it is a very dynamic and competitive world!

So, in today's world it does not help to either be a generalist or a specialist. The ethos should be "Jack of all trades, but master of one"

Re: Generalists vs specialists – Who has a greater chance of success? (2019)

#119

Post by indymike »

whoiskevin wrote: post #85
indymike wrote: post #84

It's not generalist vs. specialist, it's capacity for learning and adaptability that really matters. When things are steady state, learning capacity and adaptability don't really matter. You do the same thing, the same way, every day. When change is in play, and it doesn't matter if that is technical or organizational, those who can learn faster and change behaviors to meet the change are going to outperform. I once…

Was the legacy team free from daily responsibilities of maintaining the system or were you at an unfair advantage because you only had to work on new development?

We were the maintenance team for the old system. We were allowed to only work on the parts of the etl pipeline that required updates due to changes in the data we were extracting. The more experienced team members were dealing with mostly database issues caused by trying to load 8 million documents every night.

Re: Generalists vs specialists – Who has a greater chance of success? (2019)

#120

Post by bumby »

AstralStorm wrote: post #75
ignoramous wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. So, as the s-curve begins to climb up and systems demand specialists, then, is it the case that they'd be paid more and hired at higher levels than generalists? Which is to say, specialists tend to get hired once stability is achieved but also tend to capture more value / status than the generalists that helped the system navigate the s-curve? Alternatively, are all senior hires at stable systems like FA…

Specialists need to be trained or train themselves. This is only really achieved by on the job training or very in depth courses. So ultimately, you would hire good generalists and get them trained on the job to specialize in the field. Nobody is born a specialist. Universities do produce some but it's research, not the same as development and deployment. And you need generalists as well as multiple field specialists…

So in this context, do you think generalists are needed to set high level strategy and specialists needed to execute it? If so, would this imply that generalists would be a better fit for senior roles?
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