My favorite part about being a generalist is that I get to work with incredibly talented specialists and we tend to complement each other very well. In some wa

My favorite part about being a generalist is that I get to work with incredibly talented specialists and we tend to complement each other very well. In some ways I find that I _do_ specialize - just not along a specific field. I tend to specialize to the project. 8-10 years ago, I was building a video rendering project. I got to build the engine prototype (in an early version of node.js!), the UI (early version of react!), the data formats, the databases, the video / audio processing systems, and so on. And when we proved it all worked, we brought on specialists to help improve the UIs and optimize the rendering engine. At the end of that run, I knew more than I would ever want to know about video file management, video rendering, generating video formats, etc. And once that startup sold, I was able to move on and let all that knowledge sort of fade. I'm presently "specializing" in a project where we scrape POI data from around the world and combine it in useful ways for locals and travelers. So now I'm working with geo data, reasonably large data sets, merging data from thousands of sources, and I get to dabble in / and learn about ML, while the specialists do the more detailed, more difficult ML work. That said, I've found it's good to be better than average at some things to keep busy. For me, besides general coding, I'm decent at API-based software architecture, Ops, and planning / maintaining / optimizing Relational Databases. As for the work - Most projects need both. Someone else on this post mentioned that there can be higher pay for specialists. That's probably true. I've seen it. But generalists can have more stability as industry trends adjust.