No one fuckin' cares about Generalizing Specialist Developer.
Everyone wants Specialist Developer!

Can't you choose to be Jack of some trade with Specialist in one amongst it?

I think people do want generalists, but that are at least good at each thing they claim to know.

As in if you want to be a generalist that's fine, just be prepared to work harder for a different opportunity.

As a generalist I can write a well architecture frontend SPA, a well architected backend, with effort optimise queries, write automated tests, and sort out hosting. I can build a product on my own. Never understand people that don't want to be able to build a product on their own.

Why get caught up with 1 aspect when you can just get it all done?

There's nothing in this world I hate more then waiting for some asshole to add a minor fix to their backlog which would save me a world of pain, when I know it'll take a minimal amount of time to change and move on, but no, we play the "that'll be x weeks before we can even get to it" game.

This ^^ is exactly why I don't specialise, I want something done in the infra, I'll go an do it. I want something done in the DB, I'll go do it. I want something done in any of the damn project, get the fuck out of my way.

It's harder to be a generalist because you need to be at least somewhat competent in many areas to pull it off.

The other thing people say is that a generalist isn't as good as a specialist. Have you worked with a lot of devs? 95% I've worked with have no deep knowledge about their specialist area because they don't really have the passion. That's why they don't want to be able to do more.

@craig939393

Generalist is a creative developer.

I have seen specialist in one end who has no clue about what is happening in the other end. They keep asking for changes just for their feasibility not trying to understand why doing so might be wrong.

@craig939393 I dont understand that whole specialist vs generalist thing too. It's like telling a musician "you can't be good at both guitar and drums".

https://m.youtube.com/watch/...

Surprise. Yes they can.

@hack exactly, common sense

Reminds me of the time I changed jobs...

I'm not a huge fan of selling myself.

I hate interviews, I hate to do a sales pitch for myself and even more hate it to answer questions like "Oh what do you want to do most in our company / Where do you see yourself in 10 years" and all this lying bullshit crap with HR.

Make me a good offer for _all_ the things I could do, but it's obviously stupid to try to force me to join one specific group (eg. database administration) so HR can pick a loan depending on the name of the group vs. having to deal with me and negotiate a loan.

And I really struggled in the first interviews. Most of the time I felt uncertainty from the interviewers when I mentioned that I'm a generalist and I like to do what needs to be done... With the twist of wanting to specialize in databases / administration.

Most of the time the reaction was really like don't tell us what you want, we decide what you get - which led ultimately to me telling them that I'm not interested in an offer.

Thing is: When I get annoyed by shit like this, I can become a major fuckwad.
As the subtle honest approach didn't work, I decided to just be sassy and bossy and be more aggressive.

Which worked way better... Sadly.

It was less of a nice talk and more of a verbal exchange, but in the end I got what I wanted.

Yes, current job is a fuck fest of old shit, but I can pretty much do what I want to do without anyone constantly interfering into my business and telling me what I should do.

Long story short: I'm a generalist, I got what I wanted - but not by asking nicely to respect my wishes, rather I just went full arsehole and forced them to accept my conditions while selling myself like a slutty high end prostitute.

@hack Call me crazy but I think that having a lot of experience on one stack is kinda overrated.

@C0D4 well it's not up to me cuz big company... Can't be god anymore... So yes usually I'm telling at ppl, others like wtf is taking so long, if it were me it's be fine in a day.... Been a few weeks already....

@donuts I get it, I've been the little guy in the Corp, but the god in my domain.

It's interesting having to ask for permission to do my job, I finally got godmode in one of our cloud providers today so I stop having to ask 😂

In my opinion a good specialist is at least a decent generalist.

To be really good in a field you need to know at least a bit about everything around since no specialist is working in complete vacuum.

And also, an experienced generalist can be better in the area than a newly hatched specialist.

But when you start your journey you can benefit from specializing in one or two fields until experience fills out the spaces in between :)

@Voxera guess that's true...I specialized in *BASIC when I was a kid. Then in teen years switch to C#, PHP, and JS. Now mostly Java and some JS. And a lot of greenfield and helping others with everything

Yes, you certainly can multiclass in real life.

Naturally, that works best if you pick classes that work well together - like kernel developer and device driver developer, multiple game-development-related skillsets, machine learning and algorithm design, compiler development and language design.

But you are expected to either be pretty good in the fields you specialize in - or a senior generalist too.

Common multiclass archetypes, which aren't that specialized, are the web frontend / backend developers. They normally are expected to be able to do everything web-related but be way better at frontend or backend stuff than the other shit also needed for a web site.