You can't git clone a team

On the right team at a FAANG to a large SaaS, because the places that need all of that kind of work are few and far between. Eg somewhere among the teams that make the Oculus firmware would be close enough to the hardware to need all that sort of work in order to ship to the tight latency specs they're looking for. Or early employee at a startup making a product that's going to need those sort of problems solved on a consistent basis, that's well funded enough that you can have enough time to solve problems like that in ways that aren't a total hack (because we all know those are going to be removed Real Soon Now).

I think there's a bit of an "eternal September" where people are promoted to management, asked to hire a bunch of people for some niche role, and blog about their inability to hire good people.

Hate to break it to the author, but there are plenty of people who can write a driver, bootloader, distributed systems, PAXOS, etc. but there's NO JOBS DOING THAT so they all work for making .

The author mentions their grand strategy is fishing for talent out of universities, which is probably smart. Pulling people out of generic web dev world to go write "container orchestration logic" (or some other niche) is going to be a hard sell - most of those people were burned before by straying too far from the lucrative web dev jobs. Nothing like going into job interviews and telling the hiring manager that your last job was some ultra-obscure niche.

On the flip side few reasons why I don’t favor generalist profiles (while being one myself).

- resumes which claim generalist tend to be SEO’ed than real, or AI generated and they will say experience dozens of technologies most of which would be untrue, throw everything and see what sticks .

In most cases it just tells me what they have heard of rather than what they know especially if they are not very senior .

- It takes really hard effort to be beyond a superficial generalist, even when they know some of those skills and remember them during an interview it is not with a lot of depth they pursued only in passing interest not in a professional capacity (that is fine, but it is a lot work to make the distinction in evaluation on all relevant skills in a timed interview)

- It is harder or simply not viable for a specialist to interview a generalist , so you need to have few to hire more . If you don’t have any or they are not doing interviews you are not going get more .

- Being a generalist with depth of understanding means you are the type of person who needs to understand things properly before doing them . .You are lot of time learning things which are not required for get the task completed.

That means either you need are prepared to spend a lot of personal time and be perpetually stressed or be slow in completing something .

It is hard thing to master to let it go . I don’t think I have learned it yet

- Complexity and depth of technologies change a lot in short duration when they are corporate backed .

I learned Linux architecture or vim or git 20 years ago they haven’t changed much. You can be productive in any of these to stacks very quickly even if you didn’t use them for years .

Last I worked on android or swift is more than few years ago . I doubt I could even build a serious app without spending major time . To be productive to learning curve is steep and the prior knowledge is limited in usefulness.

Curious if there is a way to dip your toe into this kind of thing without dedicating years of learning. Maybe a home lab? I've always been interested in this because it seems hard/interesting, and enjoyed learning about it in school. Wondering how much time you'd have to invest to see if you like it. I assume there is a healthy amount of "this is hard/not fun" along the way before you find out.

A sibling comment said to repeat what you just said in an interview. Don't do that.

Demonstrating that you are a stable hire who will fit well with the team is almost all that matters. You wouldn't be having an interview to begin with if you didn't technically qualify-ish. Even when speaking to technical interviewers, you will intimidate them. Actually selling yourself comes after your first 90 days of acclimation.