I've done a lot of theorycrafting regarding specialists vs generalists. If we could take a detour to the Warcraft/Final Fantasy arena... Being a generalist is

I've done a lot of theorycrafting regarding specialists vs generalists. If we could take a detour to the Warcraft/Final Fantasy arena... Being a generalist is like being a Druid/Shammy/Paladin/Red Mage. They will never be as good as a pure Warrior or Mage, but the key here is that they can satisfy (sufficiently) both roles as one person. Let's say you're on a DPS-heavy team, you would most likely take up the role of healer. So as other posters have said, generalists are good at filling the gaps of whatever team they are on. Their role will be dictated by the voids created by their team mates. Let's say you have a team of all Red Mages. Instead of having them all heal and all fight, which can be chaotic management-wise, you might choose to have one function as a healer and the other two as DPS. Treat them as a specialist team even though they are generalists underneath. As with a real business that scales, I think specialization really is the only way to have truly high, spectacular output. That said, there may be a place, at small scale, where generalists shine, where context switching occurs more often. Maybe we could call them "micro opportunities". Let's say you have three Red Mages and no one needs healing. Great, everyone is on DPS. Let's say one round, you need to pop a heal. One mage becomes a healer, temporarily, and then switches back to DPS. Compare this with specialization. Sure your Priest/White Mage can "DPS" but the output is negligible. They are effectively healing full time. So, while there is no context switching in the specialization scenario, there is also missed opportunity. Again, not an opportunity of scale, but a micro opportunity. Personally, I love the idea of generalists. I think it's good to have perspective on a lot of things and it breeds empathy and familiarity. I think the best would be general specialists. So not "a Ruby guy", "a JS guy", and "an ops guy" but maybe "backend dev", "front end dev". I know a lot of people like that so it's not a completely foreign idea. See also "T-shaped" people from the Valve company handbook. They are people that essentially "implement" both specialization and generalization.