Why not both? You've got a long career in front of you. I started out a straight software dev, stumbled into being a "DevOps" expert before the term existed, ra

Why not both? You've got a long career in front of you. I started out a straight software dev, stumbled into being a "DevOps" expert before the term existed, ran a team for while, and am now sliding into "architecture." Being a "generalist" means that you are going to pick up a ton of varied skills. Eventually, you'll find out that one of them is something that no one else has and your current team/project is in desperate need of. Congratulations, you are now the "expert!" If it is something you like (or, in my case, was simply angry didn't exist), double down and keep pursuing it. Now you are the "specialist." If you get bored, step sideways into something else. There are places where you really do need to stop and specialize- for example, there are parts of AI are in fact hard to get into without lots of specialized experience, but much of that seems to come from Academia which at least has a clear path to gaining the experience and credentials. Even then, there are ways to side-step into it- my current team is a data science team, where I am the voice of software and infrastructure engineering reason. There is a fairly clear path picking up more and more data science or AI tasks if I wanted to, eventually doing that full time instead of what I'm doing now. I've found a lot of success and happiness by focusing on problems that I'm convinced need solving rather than technologies or categories. Sometimes that means I go months without coding (that does make me a little sad), but it is very fulfilling to see my positive change for the better come to light. It also has driven me to pick up all sorts of skills and technologies that 23-year-old me never would have thought I would, let alone enjoy!