Most jobs are advertised for specialists or full-stack. Interviews are also very specialized. Are there any teams that need good problem solvers?
How can I find teams or small companies that need generalists?
1–10 of 17 posts
Re: How can I find teams or small companies that need generalists?
#2No post body was provided.
Re: How can I find teams or small companies that need generalists?
#3Why do you think that full-stack isn't a generalist position?
Re: How can I find teams or small companies that need generalists?
#4DevOps/SRE. Especially at startups we are the problem solvers it feels like.
Re: How can I find teams or small companies that need generalists?
#5How many years of experience do you have?
Re: How can I find teams or small companies that need generalists?
#6Any company with less than 4-5 devs is going to be mostly generalists…
Re: How can I find teams or small companies that need generalists?
#7Most teams need them. But many teams do not value them.
That's my experience anyways. It's hard to find a place that will value a generalist. It seems much of IT performance is gaged off of the image perceived by others - the image that you're an expert in something, that you're fast, etc. Mostly things that generalists aren't, simply because we incur the penalties associated with context and stack switching.
I would love to have consistent work, working in one stack, on just a couple apps. Instead it's constant reshuffling, multiple roles in a single position, etc. For example, I tried to post to a new team to avoid this, but they said I'd be a shared resource between two separate managers, two tech leads, and multiple apps falling under two different programs. W T F, that wasn't in the job description or I never would have posted.
Re: How can I find teams or small companies that need generalists?
#8DevOps/SRE. Especially at startups we are the problem solvers it feels like.
Maybe at a startup. I'm DevSecOps at a large company. They still expect you to be an expert in some core language/tech. Like we work with Python, Java, and TypeScript. It's not enough to be ok at all these. You also have to be an expert in at least one.
Re: How can I find teams or small companies that need generalists?
#9There's Valve who really made a name for themselves with their unique hiring, they look for generalist problem solvers who are also specialized in one small thing. You could research their philosophy itself and try to find who else is applying it that way, or you could apply to them directly!
This gets posted a lot from their handbook: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/ac3a7d7a726bc40bf8792aef45...
Re: How can I find teams or small companies that need generalists?
#10I would consider myself a generalist, but at the same time still say I'm a back-end dev as that is my focus and strength. I can't imagine what strength a 'generalist' brings that isn't covered by an experienced specialist (which gets breadth through experience) or a full-stack dev.
Sounds maybe like a fullstack dev that also wants to own product research and development. A founder for a startup could fit.
All teams need good problem solvers. There are what are called 'T'-shaped developers. What I would consider a generalist is merely a TT (or TTT-shaped, etc) ones having more experience.
Another good area might be Data Scientist that work on problems and solutions without doing the work of figuring out all the implementation details (data engineers).