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On the other hand, a "generalist" with a couple of really deep areas of expertise can be very valuable. I like the T-shape model; able to help out in many area

• tonyarkles 11y ago
  That's how I handle my contracting gigs. I'm not sure if generalist is the right term for what I do; polyglot might be more appropriate. Every project I do, I'm typically brought in to accomplish something specific, which involves learning whatever that thing is down to the level where I can comfortably build and maintain a system. It's varied over the years: Django and Rails for web stuff (just recently Elixir and Phoenix), several different families of microcontrollers, C#, Java, C & C++, DSP work with software radios, OpenGL work (recently doing some intense linear algebra using shaders), etc, etc. I jokingly call myself a full-full-stack engineer: I can design circuit boards and write a web app to talk to them. It's kind of a TTT model. I've got enough experience under my belt (and did both EE and CS in school) that there's a few areas that I'm quite excellent at, and I've written code in enough programming languages that picking up a new one for a project isn't really a big deal anymore. Edit: Another thing that ends up happening when you get to a point like this is that ideas start inter-breeding. You have a client ask you about some mobile app that they've been thinking of, and you realize that there's a pretty straightforward image processing or DSP algorithm to do what they're asking about, as an example.