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As a consultant who considers himself a generalist, I say it depends. If a client needs a short engagement to fix some set of specific problems, then they shou

by russell 18y ago

As a consultant who considers himself a generalist, I say it depends. If a client needs a short engagement to fix some set of specific problems, then they should get a specialist. OTOH for a longer engagement or for a fulltime employee, get a generalist. The problem with specialists is they tend see solutions only in their domain. If you hire an Oracle specialist, you are going to get an Oracle solution. If you hire a J2EE specialist, you are probably not going to get a Django or RoR solution. Generalists are more expensive in the short run, but in the long run the solution is probably cheaper. If you are a specialist, you get work quicker, but it is the same work over and over. About a decade ago I was working at BEA and one of my coworkers was a CORBA specialist. He quit when they transferred him to the WebLogic group. He wanted to continue to be a CORBA specialist. I wonder what he is doing today.

wheels 18y ago
I think if we're talking consulting, that's to say, a la carte development, yes, there's a premium on specialists, presuming the person doing the ordering knows what they're looking for. There are domains where a lot of specialist knowledge transfers over. A kernel hacker and jump into glibc with little pain. Someone developing databases can jump into real-time systems and get up to speed pretty quickly. In those sorts of fields, if you've not cut your teeth on something pretty closely related, you're basically not worth paying for. Turning that around to the web world, if you only know Ruby on Rails, but can't do Javascript, don't know your way around an image editor and don't know a little SQL, you're less valuable. Somebody who's competent in several of those has a lot higher value. A year and a half ago I basically wrote C++. That's it. Today, since I also do our web programming, I regularly use three or four programming languages per week. But looking down the line, it's not an especially good use of my time to have me, a systems programmer, futzing around with jQuery.

by russell 18y ago

wheels 18y ago

I think if we're talking consulting, that's to say, a la carte development, yes, there's a premium on specialists, presuming the person doing the ordering knows what they're looking for. There are domains where a lot of specialist knowledge transfers over. A kernel hacker and jump into glibc with little pain. Someone developing databases can jump into real-time systems and get up to speed pretty quickly. In those sorts of fields, if you've not cut your teeth on something pretty closely related, you're basically not worth paying for. Turning that around to the web world, if you only know Ruby on Rails, but can't do Javascript, don't know your way around an image editor and don't know a little SQL, you're less valuable. Somebody who's competent in several of those has a lot higher value. A year and a half ago I basically wrote C++. That's it. Today, since I also do our web programming, I regularly use three or four programming languages per week. But looking down the line, it's not an especially good use of my time to have me, a systems programmer, futzing around with jQuery.