4 ms·

Sadly true, and it is influencing the tech scene as we know it a lot. While before, you would be a generalist first, specialist second - now it is demanded you

Sadly true, and it is influencing the tech scene as we know it a lot. While before, you would be a generalist first, specialist second - now it is demanded you are specialist first, generalist second, especially since programming is perceived as this "super hard thing" to learn that most people figure it impossible to know more than a few things at once. While developers understand it isn't, people recruiting them believe such stuff and are thus propagating the myths when hiring (outside a fistful of quality companies). And this kind of thinking has influenced the dev scene a lot - I've met hundreds of developers that have no idea what goes on on backend, yet are deep in their frontend career and vice versa. And no, I'm not talking about somebody not knowing the latest framework, but about people declining to learn even some basic stuff like SQL, shell scripting or deployment due to "its not my area" thing. As someone who spent a good part of their career in mobile, but also wrote a lot of frontends and backends, CMS's, dozens of tools, parsers, languages et al., it is hard to find a role that fits - either they want only the specialisation and then give me a silo of "you only work in this role and that's it" or even if they want a "fullstack developer" which means they are looking for years of experience in specific frontend and backend tooling (TS/Node mostly). It's becoming quite absurd - on one side, we are paying high salaries to adults that we task with breaking down highly complex processes and building the solutions to problems, but on the other side, we do not believe these people can understand a bit different syntax or tooling. Absurd.

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 3y ago
I confirm that it's happening in France too. I have been a generalist for 20 years, but I will need to find a new job soon due to the standard layoffs of January. The multi-billion dollars company I worked for obviously needs more money. I worked on every technology ever, from C++70s to C++23, all languages (from assembly to Rust ant TypeScript), all operating systems, all topics from web sites to embedded programming, but my new resume will be different this time. I MUST say that I'm the best programmer for backends and compiled languages (C++/C#/Java/etc.), and that I also can do everything else if needed. I don't expect HR or recruiters to read the details of my resume anymore, I must describe myself as a 100x developer on the "compiled/backend" topic in the summary, or I may lose jobs.
asdff 3y ago
It also doesn't help the training pipeline silos people like this in colleges with certain prescribed course requirements or closing off certain classes to nonmajors. We already force people to take english/second language/cultural/physical education credits to "round them out" according to the liberal arts philosophy. Might as well modernize this and require people to take some units of programming as well as statistics (although statistics unfortunately suffers from having too much boring/high school rehash/not that useful fundamentals to cover before you can get into the sort of testing you'd do on the job as a data scientist).
- al_borland 3y ago
  I could see this paying huge dividends. Being able to throw a quick script together to make light work of an otherwise arduous task is a huge time saver, while also greatly increasing the quality of the work. Even within the IT org I’m in, people who can do something like this seem few and far between. There are a lot of people who can tweak some existing code, but can’t take an idea and turn it into something. I often thought I’d be happier in a job outside of IT, but when some basic coding skills. It would be like having a super power, compared to those who haven’t taken the time to learn the skills.
sandworm101 3y ago
It is the commodification of skillsets. Companies don't care about training good people anymore. Someone who will require a month to get up to speed on some tool is now a non-starter, to the point that recruiters will often recruit nobody month after month rather than hire someone will simply need a few weeks of training. If you don't tick every little box, you are seen as a risk. 1980s: "Hey, we know you can weld steel but we need you to weald aluminum. We will partner you with one of our guys for a month before you hit the production line. He'll teach you what you need." 2024: "Your resume lacks the following keywords: Aluminum. We are shutting down the production line until we find sufficient trained staff."
- dilyevsky 3y ago
  Not been my experience. I've actually seen the opposite effect in scaleups recently - folk's riding the "i'm a new guy" excuse for years.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- scarface_74 3y ago
  Of course I’m not going to spend time or money training an independent contractor.
lumost 3y ago
Anecdotally, this perspective is more common amongst early stage companies, non-tech firms, small and low-quality tech firms. It is entirely plausible to spend a career between such shops repeating the same activities over and over again. For example, wordpress developers for SMBs can command hefty fees. If everyone you ever worked with was an X developer, why would you believe that someone could be an (X,Y,Z,A-C,E-F) engineer? Likely, this divide motivates a persistent separation of groups - when I last interviewed for such a shop,they were stuck on me having professional experience in C/CPP/Java/Rust/Go/Python/Ruby/Perl/PhP. We ended up spending 30 minutes discussing what my strongest language was which likely told them nothing about my skills and experience nor did it tell me anything about the types of challenges they have.
- al_borland 3y ago
  It doesn’t seem like there is much of a point to focusing on hiring for a particular language. If someone knows 2 or more, they know how to take some pretty universal concepts and apply them in different languages. If my company told me tomorrow I needed to use language X from here on out, it wouldn’t be a big deal. The basics come quick and quirks and optimizations will follow when using it every day. I think I’d feel compelled to try to explain this in an interview instead of answering specific language questions. I’m not sure how that would go. I haven’t been to an interview in years.
oooyay 3y ago
From what you wrote I feel my fairly milquetoast opinion is now contrarian. I always thought being a generalist is actually harder than being a specialist. In many specialties there's the luxury of being able to encapsulate lower order knowledge that would be table stakes to a generalist and they're still perceived as competent so long as their specialty remains relevant and informed. For a generalist to appear competent they must not only dabble in all things frontend, backend, systems, and data stores but also know how all of these things can possibly connect or overlap. It always seemed odd to me that someone specializes in a language like Java or Javascript. That, to me, is neither a specialist or a generalist; I'm not actually sure what to call it.

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 3y ago

I confirm that it's happening in France too. I have been a generalist for 20 years, but I will need to find a new job soon due to the standard layoffs of January. The multi-billion dollars company I worked for obviously needs more money. I worked on every technology ever, from C++70s to C++23, all languages (from assembly to Rust ant TypeScript), all operating systems, all topics from web sites to embedded programming, but my new resume will be different this time. I MUST say that I'm the best programmer for backends and compiled languages (C++/C#/Java/etc.), and that I also can do everything else if needed. I don't expect HR or recruiters to read the details of my resume anymore, I must describe myself as a 100x developer on the "compiled/backend" topic in the summary, or I may lose jobs.

asdff 3y ago

It also doesn't help the training pipeline silos people like this in colleges with certain prescribed course requirements or closing off certain classes to nonmajors. We already force people to take english/second language/cultural/physical education credits to "round them out" according to the liberal arts philosophy. Might as well modernize this and require people to take some units of programming as well as statistics (although statistics unfortunately suffers from having too much boring/high school rehash/not that useful fundamentals to cover before you can get into the sort of testing you'd do on the job as a data scientist).

al_borland 3y ago
I could see this paying huge dividends. Being able to throw a quick script together to make light work of an otherwise arduous task is a huge time saver, while also greatly increasing the quality of the work. Even within the IT org I’m in, people who can do something like this seem few and far between. There are a lot of people who can tweak some existing code, but can’t take an idea and turn it into something. I often thought I’d be happier in a job outside of IT, but when some basic coding skills. It would be like having a super power, compared to those who haven’t taken the time to learn the skills.

sandworm101 3y ago

It is the commodification of skillsets. Companies don't care about training good people anymore. Someone who will require a month to get up to speed on some tool is now a non-starter, to the point that recruiters will often recruit nobody month after month rather than hire someone will simply need a few weeks of training. If you don't tick every little box, you are seen as a risk. 1980s: "Hey, we know you can weld steel but we need you to weald aluminum. We will partner you with one of our guys for a month before you hit the production line. He'll teach you what you need." 2024: "Your resume lacks the following keywords: Aluminum. We are shutting down the production line until we find sufficient trained staff."

dilyevsky 3y ago
Not been my experience. I've actually seen the opposite effect in scaleups recently - folk's riding the "i'm a new guy" excuse for years.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
scarface_74 3y ago
Of course I’m not going to spend time or money training an independent contractor.

lumost 3y ago

Anecdotally, this perspective is more common amongst early stage companies, non-tech firms, small and low-quality tech firms. It is entirely plausible to spend a career between such shops repeating the same activities over and over again. For example, wordpress developers for SMBs can command hefty fees. If everyone you ever worked with was an X developer, why would you believe that someone could be an (X,Y,Z,A-C,E-F) engineer? Likely, this divide motivates a persistent separation of groups - when I last interviewed for such a shop,they were stuck on me having professional experience in C/CPP/Java/Rust/Go/Python/Ruby/Perl/PhP. We ended up spending 30 minutes discussing what my strongest language was which likely told them nothing about my skills and experience nor did it tell me anything about the types of challenges they have.

al_borland 3y ago
It doesn’t seem like there is much of a point to focusing on hiring for a particular language. If someone knows 2 or more, they know how to take some pretty universal concepts and apply them in different languages. If my company told me tomorrow I needed to use language X from here on out, it wouldn’t be a big deal. The basics come quick and quirks and optimizations will follow when using it every day. I think I’d feel compelled to try to explain this in an interview instead of answering specific language questions. I’m not sure how that would go. I haven’t been to an interview in years.

oooyay 3y ago

From what you wrote I feel my fairly milquetoast opinion is now contrarian. I always thought being a generalist is actually harder than being a specialist. In many specialties there's the luxury of being able to encapsulate lower order knowledge that would be table stakes to a generalist and they're still perceived as competent so long as their specialty remains relevant and informed. For a generalist to appear competent they must not only dabble in all things frontend, backend, systems, and data stores but also know how all of these things can possibly connect or overlap. It always seemed odd to me that someone specializes in a language like Java or Javascript. That, to me, is neither a specialist or a generalist; I'm not actually sure what to call it.