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I'm experiencing this now and it's taking some energy to not become disillusioned with the industry. Generalists, or people with a "wide T", are also a lot les

I'm experiencing this now and it's taking some energy to not become disillusioned with the industry. Generalists, or people with a "wide T", are also a lot less valuable than specialists. For any given technology or stack right now, some company out there is doing something cool with it, and they only want to hire people who are already familiar with their particular configuration. The couple of tech interviews I've had so far have really obviously been looking for me to keyword or namedrop some experience with whatever it is that they're using already. There have even been positions where I had like 95% of the desired experience, but that missing 5% was enough to bin me, despite having a pile of unrelated experience. To be clear, you can make a living as a dev in the guts of a BigCo or for a consultancy or web firm, and these days it's not even a bad living (for now). But if you want to work on something closer to the cutting edge, or more stimulating, you have to make big decisions early on about what you're most interested in and then pursue a deep specialization in it.

cupofpython 4y ago
> you have to make big decisions early on about what you're most interested in and then pursue a deep specialization in it I am seeing similar trends to you wrt Generalists, and this is annoying but good advice. Even when hired, generalists tend to get stuck with all the most tedious work from every department that simply no one wants to do. You end up being a one-stop shop for all intern and junior related work, with the added bonus of being invited to a lot of meetings and not getting credit (appropriate $ compensation) for your influence in those meetings. I've settled on the belief that general knowledge is something you do for yourself, and to help set you apart from other specialists. It doesn't pay you directly. I've got almost a decade of general business and analytics knowledge, and always seems to stall out on the climb in ways you describe (not dropping the right software name brand). Time to make a bet
- em-bee 4y ago
  generalists tend to get stuck with all the most tedious work from every department that simply no one wants to do someone has to do it, and if the pay is adequate, it's a matter of attitude. not getting credit (appropriate $ compensation) for your influence i don't understand this part. you already have your salary, as negotiated. are you saying that such a positions are always underpaid? and if such a position really has influence, it actually sounds appealing to me.
  - lmm 4y ago
    > i don't understand this part. you already have your salary, as negotiated. are you saying that such a positions are always underpaid? Generalism is more difficult than specialism to leverage in that initial notification. And if you end up doing work that's spread across multiple departments then it's generally harder to advance within that organisation.
  - cupofpython 4y ago
    IME from doing general work at 3 companies in different industries (which might not be fully representative): Also sorry, turns out i ended up venting >someone has to do it, and if the pay is adequate, it's a matter of attitude. the pay is adequate for the value of the work (which is low), and it eats up your time which actually lowers the average value of your work to the company. it isnt anything other people cant do, it's just the stuff that piles up because it isnt really critical to get done but should still get done. think about what you would have a coworker help you with at your job if you had a lot to do and they asked you if you needed help with anything. >are you saying that such a positions are always underpaid? Yes they are underpaid because the job responsibilities are usually pretty fuzzy. you are typically given some basic responsibilities but then expected to find more work to do yourself via talking to people. so its on you to both find valuable work to perform using your general knowledge (kind of fun / interesting tbh) and also somehow be convincing that your contributions are better than what they would have gotten from an average generalist (nigh impossible). It becomes very hard to get people to recognize you going above and beyond, which is necessary for raises. So you are very dependent on having an incredibly observant manager who applies above average attention to detail when reviewing you. how you get this work as a generalist, btw, is you ask people what they need help with. It isnt an issue with attitude, it is just one of relevance. An average generalist can be fine with this, but if you are above average at multiple roles then it becomes a point of opportunity cost. you will never work on the high-value things that someone else more specialized at the company is capable of working on. you will work on the things that were preventing that person from spending more time on the high-value things. they might talk to you about it and you might give them thoughts on the work, but it will be so casual as to be awkward for them to give you any credit for it. >if such a position really has influence, it actually sounds appealing to me It can be a very enjoyable position BUT you stall out - it will typically fall under some sort of generic business analyst job title at a small to mid-size company (ie not at a company with an analytics department for you to advance in). youll be encouraged to "build" that department by yourself, in your downtime, without any approved budget for it, without adding anything to anyone elses processes (ie requiring them to stick to a data entry format). So people at the company will typically like you, but you'll hit a lot of resistance trying to get past like $70k (near NYC). It makes me think that 1 good generalist is valued close to but beneath 2 junior employees with a bit of different specialization each. the only way I can recommend a generalist position is if you are buying significant amount of stock in the company, fully believe in the product/service, and understand that sometimes in order for a team to do its best there needs to be a thankless support player somewhere in there. you dont have noticeable influence, btw, you just know what you did and feel personally good about it. you get to sit in on meetings, typically as a note-taker (because you offered to and it makes sense because you have a bunch of misc responsibilities anyway), which means you get to make sure the most important things from a meeting are emphasized, questionable things are highlighted, and you can speak up in the meeting itself to help address misalignment's before they happen. the meetings themselves tend to get credit for your contribution rather than you, albeit sometimes you can make pretty direct call-outs that will get you credit for. the general vibe was kind of like, you are an alert system and garbage collector. a lot of the time the alerts are received as helpful reminders of issues that would have been caught somehow anyway. but that's kind of a catch-22 for proving your value. you feel fairly confident they wouldnt have caught the issue based on the nature of the due diligence you applied to the situation and your intimate knowledge of the related business operations. you cant exactly point why you think the issue would have gone unnoticed without throwing someone under the bus, which isnt fair to do before the issue actually arises. the catch-22 is that the issue isnt going to arise because you pointed it out, but you cant prove it was necessary for you to point it out unless you dont point it out. So you need an observant, reasonably skeptical manager on the same page as you to notice the shitstorms you prevent. But even then there's typically no direct means of compensating you for it. you get labelled a good employee, quickly jump to that 70k area pay cap into yearly inflation adjustments, then you end up just getting more soft benefits like openness to alternative work hours, no resistance to taking time off, and such. With the caveat that you have to correctly read the room on these things and assert them yourself because you wont be getting an email detailing such perks. that is all well and good, but it seems better fit for someone near retirement then someone with goals of trying to buy a house and raise a family.
halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
> Generalists, or people with a "wide T", are also a lot less valuable than specialists I actually disagree with this. Speaking anecdotally but also someone who works at a FAANG-esque co, full stack or “wide stack” (front, back, infra, sre) are the most desirable due to their versatility and knowledge of the interworkings of various parts of the stack.
- kristopolous 4y ago
  Someone needs to tell HR then. That is in no way what they are looking for.
  - Hermitian909 4y ago
    I work at a big tech co. IMO the market has been somewhat poisoned by the disconnect is that in big tech usually has a higher than usual bar to be senior in a specialized role (e.g. frontend) and hiring managers wants full stack engineers to be senior in all of those roles. I've had a lot of conversations with managers from these companies that they'd love a full stack dev but every time they hire one they find the developer can only really cut it in 1 layer.
    - kristopolous 4y ago
      I'm pretty sure that current valley hiring practices filter out the mischiefs needed to take things from sustaining to innovative. It's why tech is coasting and deteriorating. I look for passionate adults who respectfully disagree with me. Most firms apparently want eager children who aim to please.
jacksnipe 4y ago
Hmm this has not been my personal experience (as a highly generalist dev), but maybe I’m just lucky. If anything, my extremely broad lens has led to some really great systems design rounds, and I always crush the behavioral.
opportune 4y ago
This doesn’t match my experience at all. A lot of companies at the cutting edge know that nobody is ramped up on their area and aren’t trying to limit themselves to only poaching from competitors. In particular at big tech your previous scope and projects (like launching features, leading a feature or infrastructure team, shipping an entire product) are so much more important than eg your background in advertising - a background in advertising may be a plus for an advertising team, especially if you’re getting hired at a very high level (8+), but not a requirement or even target for recruiting purposes. I know HN loves to hate on big tech but a lot of the cutting edge is there. IME startups and “less selective” companies are more focused on getting people with very specific experience because they can’t afford to train someone up or risk them being a bad fit - and while startups almost by definition are doing something different than incumbents, that doesn’t mean they’re the whole cutting edge. Or, they are old-school and bin everyone as a “Java spring boot dev” either because HR doesn’t understand what things are easy to learn and what are hard, or engineering buckets themselves into these fixed categories and has a kind of “my turf”/static mindset with no expectation to learn or work on new things.
firebaze 4y ago
How do you come to this conclusion? Sincere question. I'm not posting personal anecdotes to support or disprove your argument, I have an opinion, and it may or may not overlap with yours.
postalrat 4y ago
Are you speak from experience or repeating something you read on hn or reddit?
jmcgough 4y ago
As a counterpoint, having a broad range of skills and experiences has been hugely important for me and my employer, and hasn't limited my career or compensation. I fill in the gaps where I'm needed, and it's up to me to create visibility and take on projects that look good on my resume. Naturally I tend to go deep wherever I end up at a startup (so I have specialized experienced that helps my career), and my breadth allows me understand the entirety of the stack and design systems better than someone who only knows one part of the stack. At startups you really want someone who can jump into any part of the technical work and ship quickly.
decafninja 4y ago
My experience has been that it's the big crufty old school enterprise companies that insist on specialists. They obsess over your resume having certain keywords or "N years of X". The Silicon Valley tech companies mostly don't seem to care about this. Actually, the SV tech companies do want a particular kind of specialist - Leetcode Masters. As long as you can regurgitate algorithms while putting on a show as if you discovered the solution serendipitously at the whiteboard, you're golden regardless of whether you have 20 years of experience in Rust or whether your previous job was serving tables as a waiter. In fact, going along with the theme of this original article, some tech companies have a pipeline for "nontraditional applicants", so I feel in some sense, it can actually be advantageous to be a former waiter whose spent time mastering leetcode vs. an industry veteran with many years of experience at the "wrong companies".

cupofpython 4y ago

> you have to make big decisions early on about what you're most interested in and then pursue a deep specialization in it I am seeing similar trends to you wrt Generalists, and this is annoying but good advice. Even when hired, generalists tend to get stuck with all the most tedious work from every department that simply no one wants to do. You end up being a one-stop shop for all intern and junior related work, with the added bonus of being invited to a lot of meetings and not getting credit (appropriate $ compensation) for your influence in those meetings. I've settled on the belief that general knowledge is something you do for yourself, and to help set you apart from other specialists. It doesn't pay you directly. I've got almost a decade of general business and analytics knowledge, and always seems to stall out on the climb in ways you describe (not dropping the right software name brand). Time to make a bet

em-bee 4y ago
generalists tend to get stuck with all the most tedious work from every department that simply no one wants to do someone has to do it, and if the pay is adequate, it's a matter of attitude. not getting credit (appropriate $ compensation) for your influence i don't understand this part. you already have your salary, as negotiated. are you saying that such a positions are always underpaid? and if such a position really has influence, it actually sounds appealing to me.
- lmm 4y ago
  > i don't understand this part. you already have your salary, as negotiated. are you saying that such a positions are always underpaid? Generalism is more difficult than specialism to leverage in that initial notification. And if you end up doing work that's spread across multiple departments then it's generally harder to advance within that organisation.
- cupofpython 4y ago
  IME from doing general work at 3 companies in different industries (which might not be fully representative): Also sorry, turns out i ended up venting >someone has to do it, and if the pay is adequate, it's a matter of attitude. the pay is adequate for the value of the work (which is low), and it eats up your time which actually lowers the average value of your work to the company. it isnt anything other people cant do, it's just the stuff that piles up because it isnt really critical to get done but should still get done. think about what you would have a coworker help you with at your job if you had a lot to do and they asked you if you needed help with anything. >are you saying that such a positions are always underpaid? Yes they are underpaid because the job responsibilities are usually pretty fuzzy. you are typically given some basic responsibilities but then expected to find more work to do yourself via talking to people. so its on you to both find valuable work to perform using your general knowledge (kind of fun / interesting tbh) and also somehow be convincing that your contributions are better than what they would have gotten from an average generalist (nigh impossible). It becomes very hard to get people to recognize you going above and beyond, which is necessary for raises. So you are very dependent on having an incredibly observant manager who applies above average attention to detail when reviewing you. how you get this work as a generalist, btw, is you ask people what they need help with. It isnt an issue with attitude, it is just one of relevance. An average generalist can be fine with this, but if you are above average at multiple roles then it becomes a point of opportunity cost. you will never work on the high-value things that someone else more specialized at the company is capable of working on. you will work on the things that were preventing that person from spending more time on the high-value things. they might talk to you about it and you might give them thoughts on the work, but it will be so casual as to be awkward for them to give you any credit for it. >if such a position really has influence, it actually sounds appealing to me It can be a very enjoyable position BUT you stall out - it will typically fall under some sort of generic business analyst job title at a small to mid-size company (ie not at a company with an analytics department for you to advance in). youll be encouraged to "build" that department by yourself, in your downtime, without any approved budget for it, without adding anything to anyone elses processes (ie requiring them to stick to a data entry format). So people at the company will typically like you, but you'll hit a lot of resistance trying to get past like $70k (near NYC). It makes me think that 1 good generalist is valued close to but beneath 2 junior employees with a bit of different specialization each. the only way I can recommend a generalist position is if you are buying significant amount of stock in the company, fully believe in the product/service, and understand that sometimes in order for a team to do its best there needs to be a thankless support player somewhere in there. you dont have noticeable influence, btw, you just know what you did and feel personally good about it. you get to sit in on meetings, typically as a note-taker (because you offered to and it makes sense because you have a bunch of misc responsibilities anyway), which means you get to make sure the most important things from a meeting are emphasized, questionable things are highlighted, and you can speak up in the meeting itself to help address misalignment's before they happen. the meetings themselves tend to get credit for your contribution rather than you, albeit sometimes you can make pretty direct call-outs that will get you credit for. the general vibe was kind of like, you are an alert system and garbage collector. a lot of the time the alerts are received as helpful reminders of issues that would have been caught somehow anyway. but that's kind of a catch-22 for proving your value. you feel fairly confident they wouldnt have caught the issue based on the nature of the due diligence you applied to the situation and your intimate knowledge of the related business operations. you cant exactly point why you think the issue would have gone unnoticed without throwing someone under the bus, which isnt fair to do before the issue actually arises. the catch-22 is that the issue isnt going to arise because you pointed it out, but you cant prove it was necessary for you to point it out unless you dont point it out. So you need an observant, reasonably skeptical manager on the same page as you to notice the shitstorms you prevent. But even then there's typically no direct means of compensating you for it. you get labelled a good employee, quickly jump to that 70k area pay cap into yearly inflation adjustments, then you end up just getting more soft benefits like openness to alternative work hours, no resistance to taking time off, and such. With the caveat that you have to correctly read the room on these things and assert them yourself because you wont be getting an email detailing such perks. that is all well and good, but it seems better fit for someone near retirement then someone with goals of trying to buy a house and raise a family.

halfmatthalfcat 4y ago

> Generalists, or people with a "wide T", are also a lot less valuable than specialists I actually disagree with this. Speaking anecdotally but also someone who works at a FAANG-esque co, full stack or “wide stack” (front, back, infra, sre) are the most desirable due to their versatility and knowledge of the interworkings of various parts of the stack.

kristopolous 4y ago
Someone needs to tell HR then. That is in no way what they are looking for.
- Hermitian909 4y ago
  I work at a big tech co. IMO the market has been somewhat poisoned by the disconnect is that in big tech usually has a higher than usual bar to be senior in a specialized role (e.g. frontend) and hiring managers wants full stack engineers to be senior in all of those roles. I've had a lot of conversations with managers from these companies that they'd love a full stack dev but every time they hire one they find the developer can only really cut it in 1 layer.
  - kristopolous 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure that current valley hiring practices filter out the mischiefs needed to take things from sustaining to innovative. It's why tech is coasting and deteriorating. I look for passionate adults who respectfully disagree with me. Most firms apparently want eager children who aim to please.

jacksnipe 4y ago

Hmm this has not been my personal experience (as a highly generalist dev), but maybe I’m just lucky. If anything, my extremely broad lens has led to some really great systems design rounds, and I always crush the behavioral.

opportune 4y ago

This doesn’t match my experience at all. A lot of companies at the cutting edge know that nobody is ramped up on their area and aren’t trying to limit themselves to only poaching from competitors. In particular at big tech your previous scope and projects (like launching features, leading a feature or infrastructure team, shipping an entire product) are so much more important than eg your background in advertising - a background in advertising may be a plus for an advertising team, especially if you’re getting hired at a very high level (8+), but not a requirement or even target for recruiting purposes. I know HN loves to hate on big tech but a lot of the cutting edge is there. IME startups and “less selective” companies are more focused on getting people with very specific experience because they can’t afford to train someone up or risk them being a bad fit - and while startups almost by definition are doing something different than incumbents, that doesn’t mean they’re the whole cutting edge. Or, they are old-school and bin everyone as a “Java spring boot dev” either because HR doesn’t understand what things are easy to learn and what are hard, or engineering buckets themselves into these fixed categories and has a kind of “my turf”/static mindset with no expectation to learn or work on new things.

firebaze 4y ago

How do you come to this conclusion? Sincere question. I'm not posting personal anecdotes to support or disprove your argument, I have an opinion, and it may or may not overlap with yours.

postalrat 4y ago

Are you speak from experience or repeating something you read on hn or reddit?

jmcgough 4y ago

As a counterpoint, having a broad range of skills and experiences has been hugely important for me and my employer, and hasn't limited my career or compensation. I fill in the gaps where I'm needed, and it's up to me to create visibility and take on projects that look good on my resume. Naturally I tend to go deep wherever I end up at a startup (so I have specialized experienced that helps my career), and my breadth allows me understand the entirety of the stack and design systems better than someone who only knows one part of the stack. At startups you really want someone who can jump into any part of the technical work and ship quickly.

decafninja 4y ago

My experience has been that it's the big crufty old school enterprise companies that insist on specialists. They obsess over your resume having certain keywords or "N years of X". The Silicon Valley tech companies mostly don't seem to care about this. Actually, the SV tech companies do want a particular kind of specialist - Leetcode Masters. As long as you can regurgitate algorithms while putting on a show as if you discovered the solution serendipitously at the whiteboard, you're golden regardless of whether you have 20 years of experience in Rust or whether your previous job was serving tables as a waiter. In fact, going along with the theme of this original article, some tech companies have a pipeline for "nontraditional applicants", so I feel in some sense, it can actually be advantageous to be a former waiter whose spent time mastering leetcode vs. an industry veteran with many years of experience at the "wrong companies".