My story is very similar to yours. I have come to appreciate that those years formed a very strong foundation for me, and today I can be domain specific with a large blob of context.
Point is if you don't become a good generalist first, then you'll be a mediocre specialist.
I’m still trying to figure out how one becomes a “generalized specialist”. I would seem that once you establish yourself as a generalist, it becomes increasingly difficult to achieve specialization.
For me, becoming a generalist has been driven by broad curiosity across many schools of thought – not limited to just software nor even technology. I can't even imagine a world where I would have been content specializing.
One upside that hasn't been mentioned, is that not not specializing leaves more room for serendipity. I could not have followed many opportunities that have popped had I not been willing to start again as a novice.
The only, but big, downside has been that I had to quit my post-grad studies and the academia. Just the thought of pursuing a single avenue for a minimum of four years is unbearable.
Related to the above, I've also had to come to terms that I won't be one of the best in the world at anything (easily) measurable. It hasn't been easy to accept, but at the same time I've also begun to appreciate collaboration much more than competition. I believe it's also a healthier approach to life in general.
I think we all start out generalists and gradually transform into specialists.
Even as a specialist, it's good to remember how to be a generalist, keep trying new things.
Your specialty is likely to form gradually, until you realize that you're a specialist one day. It will be based on what you spend doing the most for a few years in a row.
Specialization vs. generalization isn’t what has driven my success, but my overall ability to adapt. At times in my professional life I have been a very narrow specialist - domain expert even. At other times I have greatly benefited from having more wider knowledge of multiple areas and being able to synthesize among them. It just depends.
The biggest issue I have had with people is when they get to a point where they don’t feel they have to learn anything new - “I shouldn’t have to at this point”. Always makes me laugh! You should never stop learning - I’ve seen that attitude pigeonhole and submarine otherwise smart people. If you want to be miserable, just let that mindset start to creep in and dominate your thought processes :/
Isn't being a generalist what you should do on the way to becoming a domain expert?
My generation (definitely older given the replies :~) ) was sold straight onto the specialization dope. I think that smack is what's screwed the planet.
I recognized the (very, top schools) hard sell for bunkum at a very tender age. The flip side is that you don't actually become a expert much before middle age. That's also how it should be, but my second and third decades of my career were very lonely. If I would beg any sympathy for my generation's reprehensible stewardship, this might be it if I could ask without being self serving. As stands, over to you lot. Look back hard at the events in history just now being declassified. For the first time in the information era newly released history is not only relevant but crucial, because the generation born fifty and sixty years ago still living, and able to talk with you, was isolated almost entirely if not hermetically, from the rest of mankind and are, albeit well concealed by superficial wealth, personal or circumstantial to society, shitting ourselves when not freaking out angrily.
Personally I think the freaking out behaviour has been copied by the headless right rather than is actually endemic, but understanding social mimicry in traumatic stress is just another example of how much you have to figure out and filter out, similarly to plotting a course to high professional status just as any independent thinking, and the state of many professions today is that attaining independent thought is a de facto domain expert qualification.
Traumatic mimicry could be easily applied to the reinventing the DBMS from discovery of ACID (early MySQL, 00's; MongoDB, 10's) , the Russian Dolls rewriting of Windows display layers, and potentially almost any project recently enabled by putatively inexpensive compute.
Of course I'm hinting that philosophy and other non technology understanding can make being a generalist both much easier and more pleasurable, but this is a personal journey, find your reasoning where you can but remember that you're a generalist.
Being a generalist is awesome and I don’t regret it at all. That being said, you can pick a few things to specialize in too. You have to figure out what you enjoy doing to decide what would be good to specialize in and then it may take a year or two to learn what you need to get roles in that niche.
I reckon that the best way to become a generalist is a two-step process:
1. Become a specialist
2. Become a generalist
This has two advantages. Firstly, you'll be useful and employable in your youth, since a specialist with a few years' experience is a valuable asset, but a half-baked generalist is pretty useless. Secondly, and more importantly, you'll know what it's like to really understand a subject, which should help you in your quest to partially understand all the others.
I thought I was generalist until I noticed that some skills I claimed to have, I hadn’t actually used in a decade or longer. Do I really still know that stuff? How many problems I had to deal with are resolved?
This is interesting. The whole having to specialize thing has been scaring me a bit lately as I really do like the fact I can be jumping back and forth between the paths when working. I have been told that I should find something to specialize in as most of the companies require you to be specialized and there is no place for generalists anymore, which sounds weird to me.
So are you a specialist in anything? It seems you have close to a 20-years career so I was either lied/misguided or you have expertise in one of those domains?
I have the impression that it's much easier for a specialist to go general than the other way around. As such, I would like to believe that you are much more competitive than most generalists. Is this not your experience?
I don't think there's much long term value in being a generalist. I think people benefit much more from the perspective of being a specialist; it's much more proprietary and can't really be replaced.
Generalism propagates mediocrity at many levels rather than valuable competency at a few levels.
Point is if you don't become a good generalist first, then you'll be a mediocre specialist.
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