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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?

#191

Post by hansel_der »

tasuki wrote: post #112
MarkMarine wrote: post #26

No, it makes me more valuable to startups. I’m a 0 to 10 engineer, 10 to 50 is rough, 50 to 90 is boring and 90 to 100 is like watching paint dry for me. If you want to be valuable for the startups that need 0 to 50, you need to wear some different hats. You also need to know yourself. Figure out what you love in this and do that, you’ll never be burned out or bored. When I’m in the right place, I can happily code al…

> When I’m in the right place, I can happily code all night, do 2 Months of work in a day. I know what you mean, but I'd be cautious making such statements. The other way to read this is that when you're in the right place you do one day of work in a day, and when you're in the wrong place, you do 1/40 of a day's work in a day...

i am very cautious making statements about "a day's work" because i've seen a lot of devs that seem to be doing two days of work every day, the whole time.

but they did not think enough, so a vast ammount of their "work" was waste anyway and discussing it also wasted other ppls time.

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

#193

Post by notacoward »

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 popular quote among those who believe they're on its good side, but also specialization is the basis of our entire society and economy. All of software is a specialty. The most successful people are neither 100% specialist nor 100% generalist. "T-shaped" is the common term - at least slightly competent across many skill areas, very deep in a few. A team or larger organization made up of people with complementary skills (and temperaments) will consistently outperform one where everyone came out of the same cookie cutter.

BTW that's not the worst way Heinlein misled half of my nerd generation, but that's a topic for a different day and certainly a better venue.

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

#194

Post by trashtester »

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…

> ... If not, you probably learnt transferable skills.

Actually, I like to think that I focus primarily on the "transferable skills" part, with languages being secondary. Many patterns, algorithms and data structures are quite general from language to language, while they can be quite specific to a problem domain.

Once you know 10-20 languages, learning another is usually tivial, even though learning most libraries, style guides, etc requries some more effort. Properly learning the ideas are harder, but also more rewarding.

Many devs will use structures like HashMaps based on heuristics or cookbook approach. But when you're able to see the similarities and differences between HashMaps within microservices in k8s, hash joins in a RDBMS or broadcast cash joins in Spark, and you understand the strengths, weaknesses and compromizes of each, you have a type of understanding that almost certainly will be useful in whatever langauge is popular 20-30 years from now.

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

#195

Post by alexfromapex »

Being a generalist is awesome and I don’t regret it at all. That being said, you can pick a few things to specialize in too. You have to figure out what you enjoy doing to decide what would be good to specialize in and then it may take a year or two to learn what you need to get roles in that niche.

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

#196

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

memling wrote: post #186
thrwyoilarticle wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.?

Constructing into a unique_ptr[1] will mean you don't have to risk forgetting to delete it or risk managing something you don't own. You'll also sometimes get compiler spew that you'll learn is telling you you're trying to do something nonsensical e.g. use its copy ctor. In contrast, if you try to copy a raw pointer that is intended to be unique then you get a copy of a pointer and a Heisenbug.

Also a lot can be done with things that are on the heap but act as local variables.

[1] You probably don't actually need a shared_ptr and if you do then it won't stop you from creating memory leaks.

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

#197

Post by mkaszkowiak »

I'm almost in the same situation as you, also being an AI-curious SWE in his early twenties.

No regrets so far. Building stuff is more fun when you're able to handle every step. Despite that, I will most likely specialize in the future. I've found that back-end development is the most rewarding choice for me. That will be a few years down the road, as I'm in college and focusing on breadth seems like a better strategy.

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

#198

Post by tremon »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #187
tremon wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Heh, oops. Should have seen that coming.

Yeah, it's probably my personal bias showing. I'm fine with most parts of the stack (like you, down to PCB design), but UI/GUI/WUI work is an area that I try very hard to avoid.

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

#199

Post by Zvez »

In my 15 years of experience the true happiness comes from the ability to choose what you want to do and avoid things you don't. So if you in the place there you can specialize early in your carrier and know what you want to do - go for it.

But in my case I never had this chance in my first ~5-10 years in the IT. I lived in 3rd world country with like 3 IT company in the town. So I had to be generalist.

Right now while I'm still capable of doing more or less everything, I have my 'standards' of jobs I'm willing to do. For example I don't do frontend, not because I can't, but because I prefer to not do it. So basically right now I have a set of things I enjoy and I try to make sure I work on them. Probably I would be in a much better position if I could specialize in more complex fields (in terms of career opportunities), but at least I have enough experience to have some options I like.

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

#200

Post by bryanlarsen »

tremon wrote: post #198
bryanlarsen wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

Heh, oops. Should have seen that coming. Yeah, it's probably my personal bias showing. I'm fine with most parts of the stack (like you, down to PCB design), but UI/GUI/WUI work is an area that I try very hard to avoid.

I'd rather avoid UI work too. But if it's part of an otherwise very interesting project, count me in.
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