Being a generalist is a meta specialization of sorts. Some people are good at assembly of pieces - almost every CTO/Architect I have admired would be considered

Being a generalist is a meta specialization of sorts. Some people are good at assembly of pieces - almost every CTO/Architect I have admired would be considered a generalist. Such person can obtain enough knowledge to have input and be productive and doing it across concerns is pretty epic skill. Preferably engineers I like working with are T shaped. So they are generalists to a degree they can fill in but they have their own domain where their expertise is gathered. Its way easier for me to say "its just like the ... X" and if people have some rough understanding of X we can move on. If they don't we gonna have a week of explaining/understanding whats X.