Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality

I have a similar blessing/problem. I've filled forms that do the additions and keep you in check that you don't end up with 104 years. On the other hand, if you are anything like me you spend a good amount of these 40 years working 10-12 hours per day (and some times the weekend)(I remember in 2001-2003 I was working in a food company and during some weekends we would be doing the hardware work, so removing servers, installing new ones, setting up new racks etc. So those 3 years were in reality 4 or 4.5 (and I got the paid overtime to prove it).

The "system" still serves the ones who grow vertically Junior X, X, Senior X, Junior X Manager, X Manager, Senior X Manager, and so on. I remember listening to DOAC chatting with Harley Finkelstein of Shopify that was describing how he appreciates T-shaped skill-set. So you master skill X (as you 'grew up with it') but as time was going by you also developed other skills in parallel.

Modern companies & minds get it and celebrate it. Old-school-ers don't (and probably never will). There is also the thing "I want him/her to do X, so (e.g.) project management skills are not useful". And then I am happy when I hear this on an interview because I most definitely do NOT want to work with that person! :)

I seriously respect his "average, nothing fancy" achievements. I'd feel really proud if I could do just a fraction of what these people do. Haven't managed to learn audio production tools yet. I suck at drawing so much I can barely draw stick figures. Hell I can barely write legible text with a pen, I'd be screwed without computers and printers. Yet there are people out there who are not only better programmers than me but also artists and musicians. Truly worthy of respect.

I don't work in games. I once saw a glimpse of my boss's notes on me on a screenshare during one of our 1on1s over Teams. The first two bullet points he has about me are something like:

* Generalist, has worked in many different areas on different types of software

* Thinks that's a bad thing

And I do think that's a bad thing, from a career-marketability standpoint anyway. Back in the 80s or 90s, you could get away with being a "guy who knows computers" and they would pretty much stick you anywhere they needed someone who knows computers. And you had to sort of muddle through, figure out what your colleagues needed to do and how to apply the technologies you had on hand to make it easier. Starting in about the 2000s, the enterprise world especially started demanding specialists. They had a J2EE application that needed maintenance and if you didn't know your J2EE backwards and forwards, I'm sorry, there's just no place for you, BOLIYFE[0].

I had spent four years in a robotics company, and then some time at a server appliance company, and the hot thing when I found myself in need of work after those stints was "cloud". If you weren't up on cloud, the industry just couldn't use you. Résumé driven development became a must if you wanted to make a living in the industry.

And now those chickens have come home to roost in the gaming industry. Because game development isn't six guys in a strip-mall office messing around, figuring out a way to create something that thrills them at least as much as Mario did. Not anymore. I'll come out and say it: in terms of complexity, budget, and team size, games are enterprise software. Each game is an enormous project, often a distributed system, involving the contributions of hundreds. Games have passed the complexity threshold beyond which no one person can hold even a decent approximation of bigger than a tiny sliver of the whole system in their heads. The dev team is likely to be divided into smaller squads, each of which specialize in a narrow area of the game -- because it has to be. Because each of those areas, alone, is going to be more complex than can be handled by a single person, let alone a small team. And in order to not lose productivity onboarding new people, those people have to have demonstrated expertise in the narrow subset of the whole game whose team they aspire to join, typically by being credited on at least one AAA game title in that area. And generalists, unless they are literally John Carmack or at his level, don't have the deep knowledge it takes to be useful on, say, a AAA game's sound team, or level design team, or gameplay mechanics team, or scenario team.

And so we have today the situation where a Hackernews tells a promising kid, put down that homebrew retro console you built out of a Raspberry Pi and learn Unity and Unreal, because that's where you can make a real contribution to the field[1]. And he's right. The industry has changed how it works since the 90s, so in order to stay relevant in the industry you have to change too. Change with the times, or get left behind. Adapt, or die. It was always ever thus.

[0] "Best Of Luck In Your Future Endeavors"

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33452920

I’ve worked in games for twenty years and can safely say there are way more generalists today than there have ever been. Better tools and more awareness simply mean there are way more people making games. Even within large game teams you’ll also find loads of generalists.

The issue has never been a lack but that the industry itself crushes you into a box and insists you don’t exist. I’ve sat in meetings where generalists are described as unicorns. There is usually zero organisational impetus to utilise people’s abilities outside of their job spec. There aren’t a lack of generalists, organisations are just blind to their existence and have no understanding of how to use them.

As a consequence I’ve always looked for opportunities that let me be a generalist, working on prototyping teams, startups that need you to muck in and now leading a team of generalists making games. Quite a few of my team came from other industry jobs doing something specialised because of what we offered.

I think Tim’s diagnosis of the issue is correct for larger teams, generalists provide glue, shortcuts and important cross-cutting expertise. It’s just the actual problem is larger teams are also terrible at finding and integrating generalists because it’s anti-thetical to their working model.

In usual business environments, generalists are usually not very valued either, but in indirect ways: it's easier to ask for better conditions if you can boast having unique skills or be strong in a specific niche, and a true "generalist" will be expected to move to a management or facilitator role, which makes them regress their technical abilities to some amount, which in turn pushes them to further move down that career path (or out of the company if they want to regain a technical role).

I find it fascinating that the gaming industry is faced with similar issues with generalists, where I was expecting a lot more pragmatic choices and better paths for individual contributors even if they're not ultra specialized.