Why the world needs deep generalists, not specialists • Hacker News Board

Re: Why the world needs deep generalists, not specialists

#131

Post by Godel_unicode » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 6:28 AM UTC

madhadron wrote: post #130

Godel_unicode wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think that Franklin was a polymath? That's a pretty jarring take, can you expand on it?

The list in the parent comment was "legendary geniuses." Crick was certainly not that. He did a physics degree then did a bunch of half-assed work in biology. He stole some data, confounded the idea of gene and open reading frame so thoroughly that we're still trying to undo the damage decades later, and summarized a lot of early molecular biology results in an oversimplified way (the "central dogma") that we're stil…

Which has what to do with Franklin, exactly?

Re: Why the world needs deep generalists, not specialists

#132

Post by joshvm » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 12:22 PM UTC

WalterSear wrote: post #55

joshvm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Employers want specialists, and pay for them. If your CV is two or three distinct things (I don't mean a selection of languages, or front and back end dev here, I mean distinct skills like say programming and accountancy) it's very unlikely to get you a better salary. This really depends on your employer and your definition of specialist. There are jobs where following a very straight career path would be a disadva…

> I think it's fair to say that, generally, breadth is valued more at smaller companies where people have to multi-task. IME, not at all during the hiring process. And only rarely later.

From experience at a small company? Obviously it will vary.

Your comment below gives one side, where companies want a specific thing and don't want to think beyond that. There is another side to that, where the company can't afford a dedicated engineer for X, and so being able to do some of that work is very valuable. I think this is probably more common in hardware startups more than anywhere else.

I've worked at companies (My suggestion was that the odds of needing multiple skills is larger at a 5 person early stage startup than an established 200 person company. The larger you go, the more you're at the whim of HR screening. There may well have a long list of requirements, but on the job you're probably going to be more specialised.

Re: Why the world needs deep generalists, not specialists

#133

Post by madhadron » Wed, Nov 21, 2018, 3:01 PM UTC

Godel_unicode wrote: post #131

madhadron wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The list in the parent comment was "legendary geniuses." Crick was certainly not that. He did a physics degree then did a bunch of half-assed work in biology. He stole some data, confounded the idea of gene and open reading frame so thoroughly that we're still trying to undo the damage decades later, and summarized a lot of early molecular biology results in an oversimplified way (the "central dogma") that we're stil…

Which has what to do with Franklin, exactly?

Oh, sorry. I misread. Franklin was certainly a polymath. But putting him in as a legendary genius next to da Vinci seems off.