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> People are reluctant to hire a jack of all trades but a master of none 2/3rds of job adverts I see seem these days to be for 'full stack' developers. That's

> People are reluctant to hire a jack of all trades but a master of none 2/3rds of job adverts I see seem these days to be for 'full stack' developers. That's the definition of generalist-seeking IMO. > even when they admit that generalists tend to be more valuable to their businesses than specialists over the long run Oooh, that's quite the claim! I could equally claim from experience that generalists (in the sense of full stack devs) can cost a lot from the very lack of depth. eg. seeing a guy parse a scraped web page with regexes rather than XSLT. Or databases thrashing horribly because someone didn't know enough to diagnose them. Or unnecessary mem/network use in kafka because someone didn't read the docs. And plenty more. I'm not saying you're wrong but I'm struggling with your assertion.

daveslash 7y ago
In addition to 'Full Stack', we're also seeing titles like 'DevOps' and more recently, 'DevSecOps'.
jawns 7y ago
> 2/3rds of job adverts I see seem these days to be for 'full stack' developers. That's the definition of generalist-seeking IMO. Yes, but once you start reading the requirements in the body of the ad, it becomes clear that the "full stack developer" needs to be highly specialized in one particular frontend framework and highly specialized in one particular backend language. Then a generalist applies for the position and says, "I've worked with a bunch of frontend frameworks, but not this one, and a bunch of programming languages, and while I'm proficient in this one I'm hardly among the elite. But I can recognize bad patterns across languages and have a good track record of identifying the right tool for the job." And unfortunately, a lot of companies just say, "Meh, we need someone who's really good at Angular and Rails."
_vertigo 7y ago
To be fair, I think it’s important not to conflate underperforming “generalists” (e.g. not a generalist at all, just someone who is equally unskilled in everything) and a true generalist, that is, someone who is a journeyman in every relevant field. Regarding not reading the docs - I think good generalists are as likely to read the docs as a specialist. Reading the docs is a shallow form of learning that most generalists would surely utilize - on the other hand, a specialist’s knowledge in a given field runs much deeper (they consume talks and research, draw from years of their own observations in that field, have a network of people who are also specialists in that field). On the utility of generalists vs specialists in a setting like the one you describe, I think it’s extremely important to have both at your company.

daveslash 7y ago

In addition to 'Full Stack', we're also seeing titles like 'DevOps' and more recently, 'DevSecOps'.

jawns 7y ago

> 2/3rds of job adverts I see seem these days to be for 'full stack' developers. That's the definition of generalist-seeking IMO. Yes, but once you start reading the requirements in the body of the ad, it becomes clear that the "full stack developer" needs to be highly specialized in one particular frontend framework and highly specialized in one particular backend language. Then a generalist applies for the position and says, "I've worked with a bunch of frontend frameworks, but not this one, and a bunch of programming languages, and while I'm proficient in this one I'm hardly among the elite. But I can recognize bad patterns across languages and have a good track record of identifying the right tool for the job." And unfortunately, a lot of companies just say, "Meh, we need someone who's really good at Angular and Rails."

_vertigo 7y ago

To be fair, I think it’s important not to conflate underperforming “generalists” (e.g. not a generalist at all, just someone who is equally unskilled in everything) and a true generalist, that is, someone who is a journeyman in every relevant field. Regarding not reading the docs - I think good generalists are as likely to read the docs as a specialist. Reading the docs is a shallow form of learning that most generalists would surely utilize - on the other hand, a specialist’s knowledge in a given field runs much deeper (they consume talks and research, draw from years of their own observations in that field, have a network of people who are also specialists in that field). On the utility of generalists vs specialists in a setting like the one you describe, I think it’s extremely important to have both at your company.