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I’d restate this advice as “be a specialist in several areas, start with one. Don’t be a generalist, while that is sometimes valuable, it’s not always.” It is

I’d restate this advice as “be a specialist in several areas, start with one. Don’t be a generalist, while that is sometimes valuable, it’s not always.” It is good advice. I’m doing pretty well in my career at 43 as an individual contributor. Next year I’ll be earning $500k easily (and I don’t live in NY or SF). I started as a coop student out of university which helped me focus on individual specialties. One of my very first jobs was as a database design analyst. I wanted to be a developer, but, i hit it off with this hiring manager in the interview. When I started I had no idea about entity relation design, normalization, the great relational vs networked vs hierarchical database wars, data warehousing vs operational datastores, star schemas, reporting vs OLAP cubes, ETL tools, etc. I got very good at understanding a few of these tools [edit: specifically datamirror, informatica, Cognos, and Oracle RDBMS] very deeply, and became something of a technical expert on the topic of data warehousing, eventually meeting the pioneers of the field (Inman, Kimball) and eventually working for one of them (Terdeman). This was over the course of 5 years, with a sidestep into coding a large scientific test and measurement system on a Gemstone object database platform (a new area that benefited from my prior specialty). It was all a mix of serendipity and ability to focus. My career moved away from data/analytics after that into middleware and REST architecture, and now cloud computing, and Kubernetes. Tl;dr: Knowing a few tools or subject areas super deeply comes across as having super powers. It really is about focus and curiosity.

swyx 6y ago
his point is about tools OVER areas - it's good to specialize in an area but often that involves building your own tools from the ground up to really completely understand something. Specializing in tools, or as he calls it being a "tools master" at a company provides more immediate business value bc the tool probably has lesser known features that exist for a very good reason.
- parasubvert 6y ago
  Yes. And sorry if that wasn’t clear, I learned the areas as a result of learning a tool very deeply as the priority, and then expanding from there. You start with a tool and then build experience in the area so you can eventually make evaluative judgements.
jokethrowaway 6y ago
Thanks for sharing, it's so hard to find data on this! If you don't mind sharing more, is that working for a single US company or is it contracting / your own company? I'm at 1/3 of your income but I find it increasingly hard to grow from here. To be honest I wouldn't mind being an individual contributor in the future but I don't see my income raise much more than that (I'm in Europe and I literally don't know anyone making close to half a million as an individual contributor). I guess FAANGs (and stock options) would be an option but my friends at Google / Apple / FB are not very happy. Mostly dull jobs unless you're in some lucky team, less flexibility (at least pre covid, now everyone is remote anyway), more politics, similar cash compensation but very valuable stocks (which is how you make money). Plus throwing away two months of my life to prepare for a dumb interview. Instead I'm looking into kissing my IC's career goodbye, start a small tech business and try to grow that one.
- parasubvert 6y ago
  This is working as an employee at a single US company (I live in Canada). It was total compensation (salary, bonus, annual stock grants). I grew from 1/3 of this 13 years ago though I changed employers several times. Eventually the small raises / bonuses / stock grants kept piling up. During this period for about 2 years I was an independent contractor and was at around $250k annually (could be higher, but you don’t get paid for vacation, conferences or marketing/sales efforts). Building a small lifestyle business is another pathway to making a lot of money, though it too tends to take a few years. I have friends that have built niche industry software apps that gives them about $1m-2m a year. Enough to hire staff to keep things running.

swyx 6y ago

his point is about tools OVER areas - it's good to specialize in an area but often that involves building your own tools from the ground up to really completely understand something. Specializing in tools, or as he calls it being a "tools master" at a company provides more immediate business value bc the tool probably has lesser known features that exist for a very good reason.

parasubvert 6y ago
Yes. And sorry if that wasn’t clear, I learned the areas as a result of learning a tool very deeply as the priority, and then expanding from there. You start with a tool and then build experience in the area so you can eventually make evaluative judgements.

jokethrowaway 6y ago

Thanks for sharing, it's so hard to find data on this! If you don't mind sharing more, is that working for a single US company or is it contracting / your own company? I'm at 1/3 of your income but I find it increasingly hard to grow from here. To be honest I wouldn't mind being an individual contributor in the future but I don't see my income raise much more than that (I'm in Europe and I literally don't know anyone making close to half a million as an individual contributor). I guess FAANGs (and stock options) would be an option but my friends at Google / Apple / FB are not very happy. Mostly dull jobs unless you're in some lucky team, less flexibility (at least pre covid, now everyone is remote anyway), more politics, similar cash compensation but very valuable stocks (which is how you make money). Plus throwing away two months of my life to prepare for a dumb interview. Instead I'm looking into kissing my IC's career goodbye, start a small tech business and try to grow that one.

parasubvert 6y ago
This is working as an employee at a single US company (I live in Canada). It was total compensation (salary, bonus, annual stock grants). I grew from 1/3 of this 13 years ago though I changed employers several times. Eventually the small raises / bonuses / stock grants kept piling up. During this period for about 2 years I was an independent contractor and was at around $250k annually (could be higher, but you don’t get paid for vacation, conferences or marketing/sales efforts). Building a small lifestyle business is another pathway to making a lot of money, though it too tends to take a few years. I have friends that have built niche industry software apps that gives them about $1m-2m a year. Enough to hire staff to keep things running.