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Ask HN: Career Advice for a Generalist?

• JumpinJack_Cash 3y ago
  The price for stuff will be greatly reduced for you, so you'll save a lot of money. saving money = making money.
• houseatrielah 3y ago
  Young companies need generalists; their folksy euphemism is "we all wear many hats around here". Established companies want 10-years experience in some highly specific domain. There was some old post about a job interviewee at FB getting treated poorly because he thought his linux experience should in some way count toward the Solaris requirement (it didn't).
• gregjor 3y ago
  I can imagine several reasons you might struggle to find a job, especially in the current market. One reason I will call hubris, evident from your post. Your background in psychology may inform you that people who have put more than four years into (for example) software development may not appreciate someone with less experience calling themselves an expert. I expect that would go for relationship counselors, somnologists and neurologists, musicians, actual rocket scientists. I can't speak to your actual expertise or abilities, but your self-description reads like a case study of the Dunning-Kruger effect. You can think about why potential employers might find that overall impression off-putting and hard to believe without more evidence. Businesses recruit and hire people who can add value and solve problems. You have to sell yourself as a fit for the organization, and someone who can add value, right away. In the absence of objective metrics of competence (the case with software development for the most part) employers tend to look at experience, track record, reputation. They probably won't give a lot of weight to self-assessments like you offer, or hearsay opinions of college professors.
  • mettamage 3y ago
    Thanks for your response. What I'm understanding is that it sounds unbelievable/fake. Perhaps I should focus a bit more on the meta-learning I've been doing (transferable skills) and showcase hard evidence for everything I claim. The word expert was a bit unfortunate. By expert I meant compared to someone who isn't a programmer. I suspect you mean it in the sense that it is a person who has worked for 20 years in compilers, for example. To them I'm not an expert. But the thing is that such a person could explain to me what they did and I'd understand most of it in most cases. A strategy consultant could do the same thing (I'd understand that too). Explain code to the business consultant though and there is 0 understanding, unless they do it as a hobby. So far: programming, physics, math, theology (Buddhism - e.g. reading scriptures of Myanmar from a 1000 years ago and learning there are many interpretations of the texts) and related fields have been fields that seem hard to grok. One of the reasons I like programming is precisely because I found it hard to grok and still find it hard to grok in advanced areas. Psychology, marketing, music (depending on the sub-discipline) and UX-design have been easily grokkable. People teach me a fact and I am capable of understanding it and applying it and reason deeper about it. In my opinion, the hard part isn't learning, the hard part is grokking. With programming (at uni) I've often asked myself whether I was too stupid to understand it. I've never had that issue with psychology, game-design, business (courses) and UX-design (I did a one month full time bootcamp for fun).
• sacrosanct 3y ago
  Generalist vs specialist is sometimes a false dichotomy. You can be both! What gives specialists an advantage is their hyperfocus on one area, but to the detriment of other areas, so there is always that caveat. Generalists can spread themselves thinly across disciplines and never hyperfocus, so again: another caveat. It depends on your situation whether you want to specialize or generalize, and this can be a case-by-case basis.
• undopamine 3y ago
  While my credentials are in no way a match to yours, I can relate to this a lot. The only two work arounds I could come up with have already been described by you: 1. Self-censor to align with the opening you're interviewing for: works fine until it doesn't. Even if you manage to get in, you'd likely be a miserable guy who happens to have a good bank balance. Been there, done that. 2. Start your own thing: As you said, hard evidence is going to be the best argument to back your claims up. I'm struggling with this a bit, but bootstrapping a small software business doesn't sound financially daunting to me. Worst case, a huge time sink with zero returns. Moving to parents' basement helps.
  • mettamage 3y ago
    That makes sense. Up for a chat? Email me on mettamage [at] protonmail [dot] com. I have a lot of free time right now and am reflecting a lot on where to go next. This ask HN question is one of the ways how I reflect.
    • undopamine 3y ago
      Sure, dropped you a mail.