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Ask HN: Do you regret being a generalist?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you regret being a generalist?

#181

Post by sph »

melonrusk wrote: post #136
eimrine wrote: post #5

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

"A human being should be mediocre at everything" Great advice there.

"Jack of all trades, master of none, is oftentimes better than master of one."

An average human to have an average life must know how to cook food, do arithmetic, read a book, write a letter, use a computer, learn a trade. Even living a primitive life, a human to survive needs to know and do more than any other animal. This is why we have our own enormous and very energy-intensive brains and not a shared hive mind. Being average is what we excel at as a species.

Re: Ask HN: Do you regret being a generalist?

#182

Post by mmargerum »

eimrine wrote: post #5

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

love that: specialization is for insects.

Re: Ask HN: Do you regret being a generalist?

#183

Post by mmargerum »

kypro wrote: post #168

I don't know if I'm a generalist or more someone who's simply curious and not intimidated to get stuck into stuff I have zero knowledge of. I seem to have acquired a fairly diverse set of technical skills compared to most devs which has it's advantages, but at the same time I know at times it can make it hard to explain to employers what I do and how I can be useful to them. Sometimes this leads to me being underutil…

I too am a generalist and have been for 30 years. I love it all but the one thing I wouldn't do is react UI coding. It just looks awful to work on. I loved Vue2 but Vue3 is starting to look like react.

Re: Ask HN: Do you regret being a generalist?

#184

Post by dijit »

kilburn wrote: post #148
dijit wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be perfectly fair though even “mastering” backend is quite close to impossible. You’ve probably heard of the 10,000 hour rule, it’s a hard and fast rule to say that it takes roughly 10,000 hours of doing something to fully master it. Maybe not true in all cases; but consider the suite of tools you have to be practicing every day to do even a single role: VCS/DVCS, shell, OS fundamentals, build-systems, networking,…

Fist, the 10,000 hour rule is false common knowledge [1,2]. Second, splitting a general role ("backend engineering") in arbitrary atomic skills doesn't make sense because there's no end to it. Backend engineering -> OS fundamentals -> Driver programming -> Hardware design -> Boolean logic -> Set theory -> and so on... Third, all engineering roles have cross-cutting concerns. You do need some network knowledge to be a…

10,000 hours, whether true or not, is a ballpark and even if it's patently untrue: it will always require some non-trivial amount of time to get good or master a particular subject.

Not all subjects are equal, granted.

having overlap in knowledge between roles is also somewhat granted; being a complete master in backend gives a person a lot of knowledge towards being a sysadmin (maybe even 60-70% of the way to being a master in that direction!);

But, you've failed to convince me that any single human on earth can do "everything"; even if a person could literally master all technologies in use (not counting your strawman of driver programming) then there would still be a discipline mismatch.

Re: Ask HN: Do you regret being a generalist?

#185

Post by bluGill »

agotterer wrote: post #180
f1shy wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the best pieces of advice somebody gave me, was along the lines: "if you are not interested on it, don't even think about touching it, not even with the light of a laser pointer , keep away from it, play it stupid" That was short after I started playing with sendmail configuration, and I started to be named "the expert" of sendmail... BIG mistake... So, yeah... just do not tell anybody your skills, if you do n…

This advice should also translate to your resume/LinkedIn. If you list a piece of technology on your resume you should know that it’s fair game for people to ask question about it during interviews and for your resume to match on those keywords. I see so many resumes with massive lists of technology exposure. I assume the intention is to demonstrate the breadth of experience. But if you don’t want to work in that lan…

We passed on someone because the resume listed SQL, but that person couldn't answer a basic query question. This person was finishing their degree in a few months and we figured first real interview and wanted an easy question to build confidence before the interview started. The job itself wouldn't use SQL so not having it wouldn't been any negative, but claiming it and not being able to talk about it means you are a liar.

Re: Ask HN: Do you regret being a generalist?

#186

Post by memling »

thrwyoilarticle wrote: post #151
keyle wrote: post #15

Heck no I regret nothing. I can program anything, bring me your dead and I will raise it. Specializing, that's called a job. Work is work and they have a stack you gotta use, better or worse. No one can take the hacker out of the hacker though. My resume in terms of languages basically goes back in time, where I'm "expert" of what I use every day, but what I haven't used for a while I just put "good". How do you sell…

The counterpoint to this is the C developer who promises they can scale up to C++ and then takes a disproportionate amount of review time to be taught not to use malloc/free/new/delete/etc.

Educate me, pkease: why no new or delete? Does C++ now discourage heap allocation or is the common practice to use smart pointers, etc.?

Re: Ask HN: Do you regret being a generalist?

#187

Post by bryanlarsen »

tremon wrote: post #152
micahbule wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specialized technical people often look down on supposed fullstack engineers because specialized technical people value mastery over familiarity -- something a lot of FS engineers really try to be exaggeratingly proud of. While familiarity with your stack is great for cross-cutting concerns, mastery is what truly builds great software, not to mention in a timely manner. Managers are excited about FS engineers simply…

That's funny, because as a generalist I tend to look down on single-purpose developers. Way too often they don't know anything about the rest of the system they're interfacing with and produce locally optimal but globally inferior solutions. My main gripes include frontend developers that don't understand HTTP and backend developers that don't understand SQL. And besides, where does your notion of "full stack" begin?…

> since no developer can (or would want to) write both kernel drivers and html/css frontends.

You do realize this comment is going to pull the exceptions out of the woodwork?

I wrote all of the software for the first version of the Teledyne Lumenera Ethernet cameras. Everything from assembly codes in the bootloader to CSS in the on-camera web pages. Heck, I even had to review and debug the PCB design before I could start.

I don't think this is a particularly uncommon experience. Embedded development usually has very small teams, and very often the hardware has HTTP API's.

P.S. I'm available for work. Information in profile.

Re: Ask HN: Do you regret being a generalist?

#188

Post by deltasevennine »

harrylove wrote: post #69

Up until college I thought I would make a great astronaut, but only for the drama of it. Got an English degree. Learned web design. Got a music composition degree. Got my first job in web design because I didn't have the stomach to grind it out for a composition job. Self taught (via the web and the library) on software development, agile, patterns, graphic design, web standards, XML, XHTML, CSS, XPath, XSL, accessib…

You specialized in web development. You're a specialist.

You also mostly specialized in software.

Re: Ask HN: Do you regret being a generalist?

#189

Post by amboo7 »

CaptArmchair wrote: post #98
jandrewrogers wrote: post #73

Generalists may always have a job in software, but specialists often have the interesting jobs. Everyone starts out as a generalist. Like you, I am always interested in vastly more things than I have time to properly grok. Whether or not to be a generalist is a question of ambition and also where you are in your career. Life outcomes for generalists cluster around the median, outcomes for specialists have much higher…

I disagree with your premise. As a generalist, I have held some pretty interesting jobs over the past almost 20 years. What you know isn't what matters. How you decide to leverage your knowledge is where you make a difference. As a generalist, I found the ability to zoom out to the bigger picture and connect dots to be invaluable. More then anything else, learning to communicate is paramount. That doesn't detract fro…

Can fixing random companies' problems can be interesting? -- a specialist

Re: Ask HN: Do you regret being a generalist?

#190

Post by trashtester »

rjzzleep wrote: post #137
jhoelzel wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kubernetes Devops guy checking in - this is the way! 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?

I'm a generalist and I've had a bunch of DevOps jobs where I had to come in to fix what the complete mess the kubernetes devops specialist left behind. I think the question is more who a generalist markets to. Some people have multiple resume's depending on what they apply for, they come in through one angle and then build some trust and take over more. Or it's a startup that needs help, but doesn't really know what…

I happen to think that "DevOps" is one of those fields that really require some kind of generalist to do well, from the hardware (and virtual hardware) level and a fairly deep understanding of networking to how to build and optimize the kinds of apps and services that will run in the infra.

Many get the title "DevOps" who are basically Ops people with a new toolkit. One of the problems with the DevOps stack, though, as working in the infra-as-code needs a dev mentality to be done right. Many traditional ops people will "program" the infra-as-code using pretty bad quality code. (often using way too much cut&paste for stuff that could be generalized.)

On the other hand, when devs switch to "devops" they often fail to have the attention to detail and sense of responsibility found with many traditional ops people.

So finding good candidates for DevOps roles is really hard, and often those positions are staffed with people who are not really suited for the paradigm.

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