On Being a Generalist

I wouldn't put much weight in the specific wording of job descriptions, they're often an amalgamation of previous similar roles at the company and other companies.

>There is some crazy cognitive dissonance out there.

I agree, the hiring decision process within a company seems so susceptible to one simple narrative like "are they a specialist?" taking way too much importance. I think it has something to do with the fact that most of the decision makers are spending most of their time on other things, don't have time to think deeply about who to hire.

But even look at decathletes -- they usually rarely medal in individual event sports these days, and their personal bests are pretty far off the mark. Asthon Eaton got two decathlon golds, but each of his personal bests would be at the back of the standings of the individual athletic events at the Olympics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashton_Eaton#Outdoor

Or triathletes. Basically no one who is a world-class runner is a world-class swimmer, or vice versa. But you can be confident that a world-class triathlete is a pretty damn good runner, swimmer, and cyclist.

I guess it's very daunting to be sat across a table with the head of something (a person with a supposed very deep subject knowledge), when you think at any moment they'll say "what are you doing here?" It took a long time to realise that even if my depth of knowledge was not the same as theirs, having an understanding of things outside of what they knew could often change the direction of the conversation and how they (and the business) would approach things.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who's felt this way. If you're there right now - stick with it, everything gets easier!

Junior, unspecialised engineers are exactly that: unspecialised. They haven't had the the time to become good at any one thing.

At the mid-weight range, some engineers start to focus on a particular area and become specialists. Others seek knowledge across the spectrum and become generalists. Finally, others remain unspecialised. The trend continues at the senior level.

I am most definitely a generalist, and don't bring as much depth to the table as my more specialised peers. But, when working on one layer of the stack, I can leverage my knowledge of the adjacent layers to produce something much more coherent. I can bridge the gap between two teams of specialists who don't understand each other and help them reach agreement. I'm pretty decent at helping product people figure out how all their moving pieces map to the various teams we have available.

These are just some of the things that generalists give you that specialists can't. To rebut the article's argument directly — I don't know about Google, but Facebook definitely explicitly hires generalists by the truckload.