The best thing I ever read on this topic came from biology. In "The Diversity of Life," E.O. Wilson describes how specialist species thrive in stable environments. The stability allows them to evolve "deeply" into a niche and outcompete any species less specialized for that same niche. So if I'm really great at plucking fruit from tall trees, and you suck at it, I win. In unstable environments, however—say all of those trees burn down in a forest fire—it's the generalists that triumph, because they have more options and are therefore more resilient. Of course specialization and generalization are abstract terms. Reality can operate on a spectrum, often a discontinuous one at that. So maybe I'm a finch that's best at poking my long beak into a particular kind of tree, but in a pinch I can also hoover up ants off the ground better than most of the other creatures in my ecosystem. So it goes for humans competing in an economy too.
Yeah it's not quite a 1-to-1 comparison. Close, and I can see the overlap, but K/r is about low effort spamming vs. high investment intensive building.
Nothing says you can't spam specialist, niche offspring -- works well for certain kids of ants. Likewise you can spam generalist spawn as well, hoping that they'll be well rounded enough to get by in several different scenarios.
I've had a going theory on this - that it's a yoyo between generalization and specialization.
A particular topic starts with generalists but as time progresses and stability (i.e. a path worth pursuing) becomes apparent, specialization is needed to eek out more performance gains.
Then after a while, that particular area gets disrupted because there's a fundamental shift in landscape and the cycle repeats because the landscape is new to everyone. Many times this new landscape was brought on because a specialist applied a specific finding to a new, larger group. Then generalists help build that new space.
This is touched on in "Beyond the 80/20 principle".
Much like your example, though I think it said specialisation itself can offer up new generalist opportunities, so internal forces as well as external shifts.
In economic theory this is well known, and related to S-curves. First innovation (requires integration, which requires generalists/people spanning disciplines), then specialization and price war / commoditization
Interesting. So, as the s-curve begins to climb up and systems demand specialists, then, is it the case that they'd be paid more and hired at higher levels than generalists?
Which is to say, specialists tend to get hired once stability is achieved but also tend to capture more value / status than the generalists that helped the system navigate the s-curve?
Alternatively, are all senior hires at stable systems like FAANGs, specialists? Even if they're generalists, do they get valued less than them: May be hired at Staff level instead of Senior Staff or above?
Specialists need to be trained or train themselves. This is only really achieved by on the job training or very in depth courses.
So ultimately, you would hire good generalists and get them trained on the job to specialize in the field.
Nobody is born a specialist. Universities do produce some but it's research, not the same as development and deployment.
And you need generalists as well as multiple field specialists to not get locked in a quibble over comma or a comfortable but overcomplicated and bad solution.
So in this context, do you think generalists are needed to set high level strategy and specialists needed to execute it? If so, would this imply that generalists would be a better fit for senior roles?
> but also tend to capture more value / status than the generalists that helped the system navigate the s-curve?
Are you assuming that being a specialist in a mature market always makes you more money than being an early player? I don't think that's always the case, there are many stories in the news of early employees of Silicon Valley companies who are now multi-millionaires just because they were in early. E.g. one of them IIRC is the cook who was in charge of preparing meals for the early Google team.
Generally agreed, but you're looking at stable FAANGs.
If you look at startups, for the most part, need lots of senior generalists who have a can-do attitude to 'just figure it out'.
Ideally, those generalists get rewarded w/ stock (side stepping the trigger topic on purpose) because they joined close to the ground floor. Most startups don't need and/or can't afford specialists until around Series B. Again ideally, if you needed a specialist early, you've got one on the founding team.
Many exceptions to the above statement, but it fits this topic's narrative.
True. I think every team needs both generalists and specialists to complement each others qualities. For example, my manager is kinda specialists and he is great at solving problems in his domains. But then I put my generalist ideas and solution is sometimes way simpler than what a specialists was trying. The reverse is also true. So a balance in team is needed.
And once in a while, a really large disruption in all areas causes a mass extinction where all specialists are wiped out, and only a few generalists rebuild the new environment on their own.
I know you’re being downvoted but wouldn’t this be indicative of an unstable economy not an unstable marriage?
E.g., both parties may have to work and do household duties because a one-salary household is much harder to manage financially now due to wages, lack of employment stability etc.
I've been wondering something like this lately in relation to apparent species die-offs - we view and catalogue numbers in a timeframe that makes sense on an immediate human scale.
What if species have always gone through collapse/regrowth cycles and we happen to be viewing things through a too finely-focused lens that skews interpretation?
I'm not trying to make light of Humankind's horrific environmental impact, rather checking that we're not simply missing a fundamental natural law and so misinterpreting things.
This came to the fore of my mind particularly recently, listening to a podcast wherein part was talking about a rebound in the population of Peregrine Falcons, with them taking up homes across London.
- ed lol at me - 'taking up homes across London' sounds like the falcons are gentrifying. I meant, obviously, 'their populations are growing across London'.
These days I’m far less interested in what skills someone has. I’m far more interested to see if they have a track record of being able to adapt to changing circumstances. I’d much rather have someone who has shown they can adapt - or better still, will embrace the chaos openly :)
You don’t want to have everyone like that - you need a few “slow and steady wins the race” types to keep fundamental stuff going too. But I know which side of that equation I’d rather be on :)
My nickname for this phenomenon is the "robustness/efficiency spectrum." In this case, it would be the robust generalists and the efficient specialists on opposite ends of the spectrum.
(I'm not sure it has to be a two-dimensional spectrum in all scenarios —I believe there may be cases in which robustness and efficiencies are at least partially orthogonal/independent to each other.)
Taleb discusses this in his writing, if I recall correctly.
And our environment has been very stable for a long time. But the past mega trends are no more: Covid, global warming, end of boomer dominance, China dominating and collapse/stagnation of the asset bubble may change this for a while.
From a career perspective specialization pays better but in tech few specialities last a career. So also build skill sets and assets that can be leveraged into other tech or even non-tech domains.
I love video games and this makes perfect sense to me.
Games could be seen as different universes, they have different rules. Generalists looking for 'meta' ideas that can help them understand the game rules quickly and take advantage first. Specialists tend to put more effort into the same game or the same genre practicing (like typical professional players) and then slowly outperform generalists.
In the real world, unstable or dynamic societies are continuously changing rules, and it feels just like jumping from games to games. Once the society becomes stable or static, specialists slowly come into play.
On top of that, there's also another dimension of the game: speed. If the game rule is very simple, then the specialists would win very fast. Otherwise, the process would be very slow when the game is very deep. I believe the same rule would also apply to different industries.
So if I were to apply this to my career, I should be a T-shaped engineer, right? :P
Joking aside, I love this comment.
To expand on this further - maybe the question of generalist vs specialist is not the right question. Rather, I come to this conclusion when exploring that topic - adapt to the environment.
So, the 3-step plan to become successful at life (TM):
1. understand what it takes to be successful in the current environment
2. adapt yourself to be successful in the current environment
3. understand that your environment will change, so iterate over time by going back to step 1
Honestly as a human being I think you also have to be careful what you're optimizing for. This is a nice framework if you're thinking about survival and to some degree career, but as human beings we also have a very complex psychology and those problems are mostly "solved" to some degree for many of us. Money and careers are obviously important to some extent, especially if you're struggling to pay rent or eat, but beyond that if this is the only framework guiding your life, you could easily make a bunch of money and still end up miserable. Treating ourselves as economic units maximizing utility I suspect is a big part of what has exacerbated societal ills like alienation and depression.
The problem with this line of thinking is that there is a distinction between you and your current skillset. In nature a finch can't deliberately change the shape of its beak, but a human can alter their behavior. A fast learner can be deeply specialized in terms of knowledge during times of stability but then quickly switch over to being a generalist when conditions change - on the other hand someone who took a long time to become a jack of all trades may struggle just as hard as anyone else to adapt to a genuinely new development. When most of us picture a specialist, we think of someone with perhaps an advanced degree or years of experience in a narrow field, while a generalist has invested much less time in a niche, but really a specialist is someone inflexible in their thinking and focused on details whereas the true generalist is someone more focused on broad concepts and open to new ideas, regardless of career history.
I don't think it's a problem. It's just that specialization can happen in skill AND in genetic adaptability to the environment. We think of skill and genetics as separate things, but in this context it can be helpful to think of them as existing along a continuum of how we learn about the environment and adapt to it. Genetic adaptations 'learn' about the environment over multiple generations, and behavior changes happen within a single generation.
So for example, the finch is specialized exactly because it can't change its beak, and the human is a generalist exactly because it can alter its behavior. I think you could argue that any human behavioral 'specialization' is still probably less adapted to any given environment than animals who evolved for a million years to be suited to that environment.
But it is not useful here to think of skill and genetics as being on a continuum, it just produces confusion because these two orthogonal concepts have very similar terminologies, but its a mixed metaphor.
It's good to be a genetic generalist during times of instability specifically because you are incapable of changing your genes during the upheaval - and thus while you may not thrive in any circumstance the risk of extinction is also mitigated. If we had advanced genetic engineering, and could rapidly adopt different genes to suit the circumstances without having to wait for generations of random mutations, there would be no reason not to specialize genetically. While this is a pure hypothetical for genetics, it is reality for behavior - no matter how much you've invested into learning one skill, you can instantly switch to learning another, and you can choose exactly the skillset you want to curate. When a new field emerges, your experience in other, unrelated fields is irrelevant - the specialist is at no disadvantage compared to the generalist, and so they sacrifice nothing by specializing in a field.
In contrast to genetic evolution, which has very discrete goals (reproduce, survive, etc) and is agnostic about how these goals are achieved, skillsets can have a much wider range of objectives and the 'how' is integral. A finch might optimize for eating nuts or insects, or could remain a generalist to handle both, but is unlikely to come across a nut-insect hybrid where the generalist beak outperforms either the nut or the insect beak. But such interdisciplinary situations happen all the time - for example the roboticist with understanding of mechanics and software can do better than either a pure mechanical engineer or pure software engineer. The roboticist has a wider, shallower skillset, but that is only beneficial for tasks which happen to overlap - they won't have any easier time switching to say pharmaceutical development. It simply doesn't make sense to think of the roboticist as a generalist and the other engineers as specialists in the evolutionary sense.
Certainly any direct comparison of specific behavioral to genetic specializations is illogical. By what metric would you compare how well adapted a lion is to a big game hunter with a gun? How could you compare a dam-building construction crew to a family of beavers? Again, we might use similar words to describe what they are doing, but we are describing totally distinct concepts.
Tech recruiter here. What you are saying fits neatly with my observation that during a bull market the specialists tend to do great, amazing compensation, lots of contracting options.
When the market turns these are the first to be downsized because they are very expensive. The generalists are more sought after because firms try to produce the same output with fewer resources, and for this you need the jack-of-all-trades types.
I've also found that in suitably large enterprisey orgs, the generalists are the first to be let go under a cost crunch because no matter what they do, they have in their stable of people someone else who can do it better. And its very, VERY rare that a generalist is actually DOING more than 1 or 2 things, no matter how many things they CAN be doing.
I always feel like these types of posts are too kind to generalists. Maybe that's just because I am one and I am falling for the greener grass. It's true I've done well in my career, but I've never felt particularly competent. I can do a half assed job as a manager, developer, product owner, and salesman, but I am not any better at those tasks than someone who specializes in doing those things.
I could argue that I have a little more career resilience, since some creative editing of my resume gives me the ability to apply for 5-6 different careers, but my resume will be suspiciously lacking in details compared to people who have focused.
Generalists are definitely at an advantage when it comes to leadership roles and entrepreneurship, but it doesn't do me any good to be good at a role I have no chance to get without networking or a large cash base.
I think those who specialize have a more successful career, assuming their specialization doesn't die out. If I had spent the last 10 years being a really good C++ programmer instead of doing a little bit of everything, I'd have a lot of confidence in doing a lot of C++ focused jobs.
I guess it’s perspective, I’m a career long generalist and I feel confident that I can be put on any team and preform at or better than the average specialist in the same position. I’ve backed this up with every position I’ve had and have built a network of people that know and trust when I say I can do something. I think that’s more important than any specialist because if I don’t know an answer or how to solve something I will study and learn the material until I do.
I tend to agree, and for strong performers/individuals (or just people who are willing to learn quickly/go outside of their comfort zone), it is often possible to become proficient at many ‘specialized’ roles. Especially with softer things, like moving between Java/C#/Kotlin/Swift, or Android/iOS development. There’s a lot involved in each ecosystem, but there’s also a lot of commonality. And, frankly, we shouldn’t pretend like the average contributor on every team is a genius.
There are still roles that probably do require actually specializing to become great at (e.g. graphics/game engine dev comes to mind) but those roles are comparably rare. Most of the Android/iOS/Java/C#/React/JS/TypeScript/etc developers I’ve met could become proficient in any of those other technologies, they just choose not to, perhaps out of comfort. FWIW, in my personal experience, willingness to learn new things/broaden perspective & skill base (a.k.a. being a generalist) is correlated with job performance to the point where ‘not in my job description’ and ‘no I won’t learn UIKit, I’m an Android developer’ stand out as major red flags. “I don’t have time to learn React because I need to familiarize myself with the 8 new types of pointers C++ added this release’ feels a little more reasonable, but again, the great C++ developers I’ve met are still willing to get their hands dirty in other areas.
Tl;dr specialists are (usually) generalists with an attitude problem
I started my career in digital media on interactive installations and I think that is the most influential position I’ve ever had. Every application was different and designed to the clients creative needs; wrote graphics engines, networking engines, transparent h264 format, hardware/software device integration, etc.
I kind of don't know where to put myself on that spectrum. While I'm dealing with a pretty narrow, specialist role - data engineering, there is extreme breadth of tools and approaches in the field. I feel that internally I'm generalist, picking up new tools and ideas with ease. Especially compared to people that mastered internals of Oracle DB for 20 years.
Imho bi / data people need to be generalists to be good. Even if you've only done data, if you're good, i bet you have got inside the heads many job roles, within and outwith IT. You've probably dealt with you're fair share of connectivity and authentication / permission issues. Not to mention being able to translate between strategic objectives and day to day data capture..
It's also something of a continuum. I was an IT industry analyst working for a small firm. This made me acutely aware of consciously picking a point on that continuum. We definitely tended to be more generalist than analysts at big firms who knew narrow areas inside out--and therefore we were better at drawing connections between different topics. By the same token, we needed to be narrow enough to have genuinely deeper knowledge about some set of related technology areas than a more casual observer would have.
I still do something similar within a vendor today and I do find myself having to consciously tell myself "It's OK not to understand much about $X technology area."
There are certainly times when I have to be okay not knowing the whole picture of what I’m working on. I think most problems when broken down enough start to have very simple, similar solutions, or some combination. So if you don’t understand x technology as a whole, you may know a lot about the he individual aspects of the technology.
A focus on a single topic/category/skillset. The Ford dealership has a bunch of mechanics who specialize in Ford vehicles, but I find that my preferred mechanic does a better job.
(In this case better job means: fixes it the first time, with no new problems after, and the work doesn't feel sloppy unlike the warranty repair I had to have done by the dealer. In the later case they just reattached 2 panels wrong, something a specialist should be able to do without problems)
I have a very good friend who leaned into C++ hard about 10 years ago. He's now sitting on one of the languages sub-committees. I think he'll never have any shortage of employment opportunities doing work that he finds interesting. At the same time, I leaned into Ruby hard. I'm now leading a team that writes JavaScript and, quite frankly, I do not have the same confidence. I'm not even confident that I'll be writing JavaScript in the next 1-2 years...
Interesting perspective. I'm on the other end of the coin. Work with mostly C++. Looking at job boards, there are endless opportunities for Ruby and JavaScript positions, not so much for C++ these days. JavaScript will probably be fine for as long as the web exists.
There's a lot of churn in projects / jobs but also in tooling, ecosystem, etc...
I've written web applications in: Ruby, Python, C#, Elixir, and JavaScript in the last 5 years alone. I could technically add Lua to that list, too.
I can get a job done, even jobs that are fairly complex, and sometimes (I'd wager I'm batting 0.500 for whatever that's worth) those projects do have long legs... But I don't have the sort of depth of skill or command of language and specific tooling that I expected to have at this point in my career. That is what feeds into my feelings.
Another way of thinking about this is absolute returns vs risk-adjusted returns. Maybe as a specialist you’d have higher absolute returns, but the probability that your speciality dies may mean your risk adjusted returns are higher for generalists.
I am not sure I buy the authors argument. I am not even sure if I am clear about how the author defines a generalist and specialist!!
The way the world knowledge is evolving, there is a blurring of what we call specialist and generalist.
For e.g. If you are a medical researcher, then knowledge of biology, biochemistry, software development (simulation anyone) and maths is required. Now is this specialisation or being generalist?
To me specialists go deeper and solver harder problems. They work on a problem or set of problems in the same space for years together.
Generalists span either multiple disciplines and leverage the connections or have an overview of the field and jump between sub knowledge every couple of years.
And which is better? It all depends on context!
In a space which has higher population of specialist then generalist will be more successful as they will be able to tap into multiple peoples work which a specialist will find harder to do.
In case there are many generalists in a given space then specialisation is the way to go as you can take up problems that generalists will never be able to see or solve.
If there are many generalists in a given space, doesn't that make them specialists? And you'd just be more-specialised?
Can you think of an example of when this might have occurred?
Seems by that line of thinking today's specialists are tomorrow's generalists, even if they do nothing differently.
I long considered myself a generalist because I typically work with early stage startups to get them going and growing, and that requires being competent at many things, wearing many hats. I now position myself as a specialist at growing early stage startups, because that wide of a skillset is exactly what you need to be successful in that context.
If really recommend the book that the article is about. I'm a few chapters in (started it a few weeks) and it's a fun read so far with some interesting stories and data.
In mathematics, there is this thing called the “Curse of Dimensionality”.
In careers, there is the “Blessing of Dimensionality.” If you can make yourself good along multiples axes, you can carve a niche out for yourself. Maybe you are a top 20% coder. That alone, may be enough to get you a pretty good job. However, if you also have top 20% people skills, suddenly you have opened a very nice niche for yourself and are a very strong candidate for Director of Engineering or above.
Instead of obsessing about your weakness is a single dimension and worrying about if you are specialist or generalist, develop another dimension of competence.
Specialization only matters if the specialization is valued for top quality. A diner can make me a good enough burger, but there are places I’ll go to for a top quality burger.
In software development, business mostly wants good enough. The bulk of the products being developed don’t value top quality, so it’s becoming increasingly pointless to invest into a specialty.
The world problems however needs all the specialists and generalists. And instead of taking generalists too far, a specialist with minimum knowledge and experience in few other contrasting domains is good enough for him to get creative, draw analogies and solve problems.
I doubt, there's such a thing as a real generalist, that knows SW development, negotiation, history of Italy, international politics, engine design, ... to the same level of depth.
When we speak about successful generalists, they are still quite specialized. They might know some data analysis (maybe limited by Excel and VB macros), some teamwork skills, some marketing/sales/product ownership knowledge, some competitive intelligence, some understanding of work laws and how to form a company.
Such a person would be considered a generalist, but as I see it, such a person still ignores 99% of fields of study.
This! I think of a generalist as someone who learn very quickly and adapt to the situation. Not necessarily as someone who knows many things. Thinking from a startup point of view, usually when looking for a generalist you are looking for someone who can help to jump on things on fire or take a first stab at a new process.
Being more capable in all situations can be a goal. What you are describing is a
Renaissance man, also called Universal Man, Italian Uomo Universale, an ideal that developed in Renaissance Italy from the notion expressed by one of its most-accomplished representatives, Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72), that “a man can do all things if he will.” The ideal embodied the basic tenets of Renaissance humanism, which considered man the centre of the universe, limitless in his capacities for development, and led to the notion that men should try to embrace all knowledge and develop their own capacities as fully as possible.
Cyrano: I was wandering in a maze
I’d too many complicated paths to take:
I took ...
Le Bret: Which?
Cyrano: Oh! Of them all, the simplest one.
I decided to be brilliant at everything, with everyone!
I know about Reneissance man, but this isn't what I had in my mind when writing it. With Reneissance men, you expect them to be extraordinary creatures who don't only have breadth, but also depth.
What I meant by generalists, it was a lot of breadth without depth. Like knowing one city from every country, but not knowing more in any. Like knowing one painting from all major artists, but not knowing second and third from anyone. Being able to paint a dog, but not a cat, a man, a castle.
Being such a generalist would not be practical. In fact, it would be useless. Even Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, student of anatomy and engineer. He wasn't archeologist, expert on India, or circus acrobat who can juggle with torches. Da Vinci was specialized too.
What I see in generalists today, are very often general managerial/entrepreneurial skills mixed with some level of expertise in one or two fields. And calling this generalist seems as bad naming practice.
I think these sort of people exist, but they are likely quite rare. I think it'd lack humility to claim I am one of those people, but I will say that I found several other people who were like me but more in this regard during my career by trying many different hobbies and identifying people I respect and work with that share these hobbies. The Gallup StrengthsFinder personality assessment has two strengths, "Learner" (breadth) and "Ideation" (depth), people who have both are rare and perhaps jokingly called "certified know-it-alls", but it's been my experience that this is pretty much true and some people do have the personality to pursue many varied disconnected interests at depth. It's also one reason I believe STEAM is a real thing, because I've met many folks like this that are as gifted in artistry as they are in (physical) engineering and mechanics, as they are in software development. I certainly lack the gifts in artistry myself.
I don't think I've ever met anyone who has depth in every field of study, but I don't think this is a fair requirement to be considered a true generalist.
> Now please come up with a measure if an economy is elaborated and functional.
A friend once referred me to a "public transport" measure, which might not be the panacea for defining an economy's success, but it's certainly an interesting take.
I wish I could find the paper / article (I tried), but in essence, the extent to which an economy has implemented effective public transport can be used as a measure of economic success.
Edit: I also completely agree with your first point.
Well T-shaped individuals have greatest chance of success.
What rubs me the wrong way is the false dichotomy like one can only be a specialist or a generalist. It is always presented as if for example chess players would not even know how to eat. There was a joke in the "Top Gear" about "Stig" racing driver that would fall to the ground if taken out of a car.
There is also much more to it because world is complex. For example I am software developer so for business people I am a specialist. But I am also a "full stack developer" where for my fellow developers I am a generalist. Then I mostly specialize in .NET and Angular.
I specialize in .net too, but in a general way. i'm bad at everything. People who i work with who don't know anything about programming thinks i'm a specialist for some reason. luckily i'm the only programmer in my company. I feel like a fake, because I work for a really good company.
You're probably better than you think. If your company is good, it probably has a good culture and it feels there achieving great things requires not that much effort. I've felt that in good teams, big outcomes are easy, while bad teams will struggle to deliver simple projects.
Also nowadays there are so many options to connect with other developers. Check the meetups (now most are virtual, so doesn't matter where you live much), or the indie hacker scene for example.
As with most categories, labels, and taxonomy, the dichotomy is a human construct. Of course it's not true absolutely. But it still has utility to ponder, and when applied to specific contexts can be powerful.
It's not at all clear to me why a T-shaped individual would be better than "square" individual of the same depth (ie something with more overall surface area).
I'd say the assumption is that your square shape would sacrifice breadth for depth across their breadth. The assumption is that time is fixed and you can only learn and master a certain amount of material to a certain degree. At some point you're going to sacrifice something for the other because time is fixed. There's probably another element to consider: memory, learning rate, and rate of change of a given industry. If an industry moves fast your dabbling in that field can useless fairly quickly.
The assumption that somebody needs to have sacrificed breadth for depth is only true in the hypothetical case where you need to choose between two applicants with exactly the same amount of experience. In practice, you will encounter candidates who are just better at everything than the other candidate. That is something experience can give you.
> Well T-shaped individuals have greatest chance of success.
Personally, I feel like T-shaped individuals are a chimera. I don't know anyone whom I'd considered T-shaped. Maybe it's just my location. I have noticed that even the highest placed engineers at my companies, and I'm talking world leaders in certain areas, often do not like to venture even a little bit outside of their specialization.
> For example I am software developer so for business people I am a specialist. But I am also a "full stack developer" where for my fellow developers I am a generalist. Then I mostly specialize in .NET and Angular.
This I can absolutely agree with. I would not call that a T-shaped person; rather, to me, the above is a generalist. I do think that this depends on a point of view. But T-shaped person signifies that a person has one deep specialization. I'd say that having a deep specialization goes against going wide.
From my observation, I've never seen a person who'd have both deep specialization and be comfortable with other technologies on the side.
I think this is like asking "which batter will do better, the one who swings low and inside or the one who swings high and outside?". Ok, I don't really follow baseball so maybe the metaphor is broken but my point is - it depends on what the situation requires and there is no way to predict that in advance. For any tendency or trait an individual demonstrates there will be times when that trait results in success or failure.
It is silly to generalize about which is "better" or more likely to succeed because an "ecosystem" will by design contain both so that as a whole the ecosystem is robust to a variety of unforeseen situations (or nothing happening).
In humans you have people who are specialists or generalists, bold or conservative, jay walkers or rule followers, finicky eaters or people who eat pizza that's been on the counter for a week, gamblers or savers, etc, etc. In every case there will be specific examples that make you think "damn I really wish I'd sunk my life savings into BTC 10 years ago!" but that doesn't make you "right" or "wrong" except in hindsight.
Humans (and other populations) should be judged on the spectrum of behaviors they exhibit and how that allows them to succeed in the specific distribution of challenges they face. Judging individuals seems pretty pointless, I guess, unless you are judging yourself and feeling unhappy with the specific tendencies genetics and your upbringing have dealt you. Anyway, just an interesting thing to consider.
The point is that you can calculate odds of success.
Yes, you cannot predict the future precisely, but if you can estimate, that there is an X chance that in the future 70% specialists and 30% generalists are required, and the population will be 50/50 generalist/specialist, then you can make an informed decision which path should you choose if your goal is money/job security.
You may proven to be wrong, you may turn out not to be a good fit at all in your chosen role, but at least you took a calculated risk, instead of gambling.
To find differentiated success as a specialist in such a world, you need that imbalance of supply and demand and to have a relevant specialty. A specialist in buggy whip making or blood-letting can still likely suffer for a lack of demand for their specialty relative to the supply that they’re offering, even if the global demand for specialists is high.
Someone told me you gotta have a "T shaped" skillset. Well, how else could it be? I've never met any one who is just a straight line deep. Everyone is is an upside down triangle with multiple spikes at the bottom (their specializations) otherwise you couldn't have gained the specialized knowledge without learning the general stuff. But that's a stretch, let's not deduce someone's career into a couple of difference shapes. Careers are complex as they evolve sort of in a chaotic system of professional environments.
T-shaped is largely a made up concept without any real observations, and it sounds good initially but after contemplation it falls apart. One of those urban-legends that keeps circulating in big corps.
100% agree - its a meme because it appears as a hiring criteria in the Valve handbook and Valve is successful therefore T shaped must be a great quality to have.
T shaped neatly sidesteps any mention of tradeoffs. Have your cake and eat it too! What utter nonsense. Why not Pi shaped or Comb shaped? (google those - they exist).
In an immature market, be a generalist. Be good at switching tools quickly because they'll come and go, and be good at the general problem-solving process because you'll face a lot of problems with new tools.
In a mature market, be a specialist. Be good at one very popular tool, and specifically solving one problem with it, and you'll find a ton of companies willing to pay you a lot in order to solve that one particular problem quickly.
I wrote a blog bost[0] about the idea of The Stalactite Developer about a year ago. I like this metaphor better than T shaped and I have applied it effectively throughout my career.
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." -- Robert Heinlein
Some things do come at the cost of others, but I think you'll be surprised how many proficiencies you can come up with in a life well lived.
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 249 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory
Nothing says you can't spam specialist, niche offspring -- works well for certain kids of ants. Likewise you can spam generalist spawn as well, hoping that they'll be well rounded enough to get by in several different scenarios.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_succession
A particular topic starts with generalists but as time progresses and stability (i.e. a path worth pursuing) becomes apparent, specialization is needed to eek out more performance gains.
Then after a while, that particular area gets disrupted because there's a fundamental shift in landscape and the cycle repeats because the landscape is new to everyone. Many times this new landscape was brought on because a specialist applied a specific finding to a new, larger group. Then generalists help build that new space.
Maybe this is obvious...
And yep, you’re spot on.
Much like your example, though I think it said specialisation itself can offer up new generalist opportunities, so internal forces as well as external shifts.
One of my favourite books of late.
Which is to say, specialists tend to get hired once stability is achieved but also tend to capture more value / status than the generalists that helped the system navigate the s-curve?
Alternatively, are all senior hires at stable systems like FAANGs, specialists? Even if they're generalists, do they get valued less than them: May be hired at Staff level instead of Senior Staff or above?
Nobody is born a specialist. Universities do produce some but it's research, not the same as development and deployment.
And you need generalists as well as multiple field specialists to not get locked in a quibble over comma or a comfortable but overcomplicated and bad solution.
Are you assuming that being a specialist in a mature market always makes you more money than being an early player? I don't think that's always the case, there are many stories in the news of early employees of Silicon Valley companies who are now multi-millionaires just because they were in early. E.g. one of them IIRC is the cook who was in charge of preparing meals for the early Google team.
If you look at startups, for the most part, need lots of senior generalists who have a can-do attitude to 'just figure it out'.
Ideally, those generalists get rewarded w/ stock (side stepping the trigger topic on purpose) because they joined close to the ground floor. Most startups don't need and/or can't afford specialists until around Series B. Again ideally, if you needed a specialist early, you've got one on the founding team.
Many exceptions to the above statement, but it fits this topic's narrative.
E.g., both parties may have to work and do household duties because a one-salary household is much harder to manage financially now due to wages, lack of employment stability etc.
What if species have always gone through collapse/regrowth cycles and we happen to be viewing things through a too finely-focused lens that skews interpretation?
I'm not trying to make light of Humankind's horrific environmental impact, rather checking that we're not simply missing a fundamental natural law and so misinterpreting things.
This came to the fore of my mind particularly recently, listening to a podcast wherein part was talking about a rebound in the population of Peregrine Falcons, with them taking up homes across London.
- ed lol at me - 'taking up homes across London' sounds like the falcons are gentrifying. I meant, obviously, 'their populations are growing across London'.
These days I’m far less interested in what skills someone has. I’m far more interested to see if they have a track record of being able to adapt to changing circumstances. I’d much rather have someone who has shown they can adapt - or better still, will embrace the chaos openly :)
You don’t want to have everyone like that - you need a few “slow and steady wins the race” types to keep fundamental stuff going too. But I know which side of that equation I’d rather be on :)
(I'm not sure it has to be a two-dimensional spectrum in all scenarios —I believe there may be cases in which robustness and efficiencies are at least partially orthogonal/independent to each other.)
Taleb discusses this in his writing, if I recall correctly.
- do you keep searching in breadth for new avenues
- or is it time to dive in depth in what you found so far.
And this is even optimized through something called "regret".
- example: https://rlss.inria.fr/files/2019/07/exploration_lazaric_1.pd...
From a career perspective specialization pays better but in tech few specialities last a career. So also build skill sets and assets that can be leveraged into other tech or even non-tech domains.
Games could be seen as different universes, they have different rules. Generalists looking for 'meta' ideas that can help them understand the game rules quickly and take advantage first. Specialists tend to put more effort into the same game or the same genre practicing (like typical professional players) and then slowly outperform generalists.
In the real world, unstable or dynamic societies are continuously changing rules, and it feels just like jumping from games to games. Once the society becomes stable or static, specialists slowly come into play.
On top of that, there's also another dimension of the game: speed. If the game rule is very simple, then the specialists would win very fast. Otherwise, the process would be very slow when the game is very deep. I believe the same rule would also apply to different industries.
Joking aside, I love this comment.
To expand on this further - maybe the question of generalist vs specialist is not the right question. Rather, I come to this conclusion when exploring that topic - adapt to the environment.
So, the 3-step plan to become successful at life (TM):
1. understand what it takes to be successful in the current environment
2. adapt yourself to be successful in the current environment
3. understand that your environment will change, so iterate over time by going back to step 1
Something in a deep minimum may well go to heck when y’all he situation changes just a little bit.
I don't think it's a problem. It's just that specialization can happen in skill AND in genetic adaptability to the environment. We think of skill and genetics as separate things, but in this context it can be helpful to think of them as existing along a continuum of how we learn about the environment and adapt to it. Genetic adaptations 'learn' about the environment over multiple generations, and behavior changes happen within a single generation.
So for example, the finch is specialized exactly because it can't change its beak, and the human is a generalist exactly because it can alter its behavior. I think you could argue that any human behavioral 'specialization' is still probably less adapted to any given environment than animals who evolved for a million years to be suited to that environment.
It's good to be a genetic generalist during times of instability specifically because you are incapable of changing your genes during the upheaval - and thus while you may not thrive in any circumstance the risk of extinction is also mitigated. If we had advanced genetic engineering, and could rapidly adopt different genes to suit the circumstances without having to wait for generations of random mutations, there would be no reason not to specialize genetically. While this is a pure hypothetical for genetics, it is reality for behavior - no matter how much you've invested into learning one skill, you can instantly switch to learning another, and you can choose exactly the skillset you want to curate. When a new field emerges, your experience in other, unrelated fields is irrelevant - the specialist is at no disadvantage compared to the generalist, and so they sacrifice nothing by specializing in a field.
In contrast to genetic evolution, which has very discrete goals (reproduce, survive, etc) and is agnostic about how these goals are achieved, skillsets can have a much wider range of objectives and the 'how' is integral. A finch might optimize for eating nuts or insects, or could remain a generalist to handle both, but is unlikely to come across a nut-insect hybrid where the generalist beak outperforms either the nut or the insect beak. But such interdisciplinary situations happen all the time - for example the roboticist with understanding of mechanics and software can do better than either a pure mechanical engineer or pure software engineer. The roboticist has a wider, shallower skillset, but that is only beneficial for tasks which happen to overlap - they won't have any easier time switching to say pharmaceutical development. It simply doesn't make sense to think of the roboticist as a generalist and the other engineers as specialists in the evolutionary sense.
Certainly any direct comparison of specific behavioral to genetic specializations is illogical. By what metric would you compare how well adapted a lion is to a big game hunter with a gun? How could you compare a dam-building construction crew to a family of beavers? Again, we might use similar words to describe what they are doing, but we are describing totally distinct concepts.
When the market turns these are the first to be downsized because they are very expensive. The generalists are more sought after because firms try to produce the same output with fewer resources, and for this you need the jack-of-all-trades types.
I could argue that I have a little more career resilience, since some creative editing of my resume gives me the ability to apply for 5-6 different careers, but my resume will be suspiciously lacking in details compared to people who have focused.
Generalists are definitely at an advantage when it comes to leadership roles and entrepreneurship, but it doesn't do me any good to be good at a role I have no chance to get without networking or a large cash base.
I think those who specialize have a more successful career, assuming their specialization doesn't die out. If I had spent the last 10 years being a really good C++ programmer instead of doing a little bit of everything, I'd have a lot of confidence in doing a lot of C++ focused jobs.
There are still roles that probably do require actually specializing to become great at (e.g. graphics/game engine dev comes to mind) but those roles are comparably rare. Most of the Android/iOS/Java/C#/React/JS/TypeScript/etc developers I’ve met could become proficient in any of those other technologies, they just choose not to, perhaps out of comfort. FWIW, in my personal experience, willingness to learn new things/broaden perspective & skill base (a.k.a. being a generalist) is correlated with job performance to the point where ‘not in my job description’ and ‘no I won’t learn UIKit, I’m an Android developer’ stand out as major red flags. “I don’t have time to learn React because I need to familiarize myself with the 8 new types of pointers C++ added this release’ feels a little more reasonable, but again, the great C++ developers I’ve met are still willing to get their hands dirty in other areas.
Tl;dr specialists are (usually) generalists with an attitude problem
I still do something similar within a vendor today and I do find myself having to consciously tell myself "It's OK not to understand much about $X technology area."
(In this case better job means: fixes it the first time, with no new problems after, and the work doesn't feel sloppy unlike the warranty repair I had to have done by the dealer. In the later case they just reattached 2 panels wrong, something a specialist should be able to do without problems)
I've written web applications in: Ruby, Python, C#, Elixir, and JavaScript in the last 5 years alone. I could technically add Lua to that list, too.
I can get a job done, even jobs that are fairly complex, and sometimes (I'd wager I'm batting 0.500 for whatever that's worth) those projects do have long legs... But I don't have the sort of depth of skill or command of language and specific tooling that I expected to have at this point in my career. That is what feeds into my feelings.
The way the world knowledge is evolving, there is a blurring of what we call specialist and generalist. For e.g. If you are a medical researcher, then knowledge of biology, biochemistry, software development (simulation anyone) and maths is required. Now is this specialisation or being generalist?
To me specialists go deeper and solver harder problems. They work on a problem or set of problems in the same space for years together.
Generalists span either multiple disciplines and leverage the connections or have an overview of the field and jump between sub knowledge every couple of years.
And which is better? It all depends on context!
In a space which has higher population of specialist then generalist will be more successful as they will be able to tap into multiple peoples work which a specialist will find harder to do.
In case there are many generalists in a given space then specialisation is the way to go as you can take up problems that generalists will never be able to see or solve.
For me it's all about context.
Seems by that line of thinking today's specialists are tomorrow's generalists, even if they do nothing differently.
I long considered myself a generalist because I typically work with early stage startups to get them going and growing, and that requires being competent at many things, wearing many hats. I now position myself as a specialist at growing early stage startups, because that wide of a skillset is exactly what you need to be successful in that context.
In many cases, its about how you frame it.
In careers, there is the “Blessing of Dimensionality.” If you can make yourself good along multiples axes, you can carve a niche out for yourself. Maybe you are a top 20% coder. That alone, may be enough to get you a pretty good job. However, if you also have top 20% people skills, suddenly you have opened a very nice niche for yourself and are a very strong candidate for Director of Engineering or above.
Instead of obsessing about your weakness is a single dimension and worrying about if you are specialist or generalist, develop another dimension of competence.
However, I do relay on some specialists in my Team to fulfill other demands.
For me, a good Team had both.
In software development, business mostly wants good enough. The bulk of the products being developed don’t value top quality, so it’s becoming increasingly pointless to invest into a specialty.
Things can change of course.
When we speak about successful generalists, they are still quite specialized. They might know some data analysis (maybe limited by Excel and VB macros), some teamwork skills, some marketing/sales/product ownership knowledge, some competitive intelligence, some understanding of work laws and how to form a company.
Such a person would be considered a generalist, but as I see it, such a person still ignores 99% of fields of study.
Renaissance man, also called Universal Man, Italian Uomo Universale, an ideal that developed in Renaissance Italy from the notion expressed by one of its most-accomplished representatives, Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72), that “a man can do all things if he will.” The ideal embodied the basic tenets of Renaissance humanism, which considered man the centre of the universe, limitless in his capacities for development, and led to the notion that men should try to embrace all knowledge and develop their own capacities as fully as possible.
What I meant by generalists, it was a lot of breadth without depth. Like knowing one city from every country, but not knowing more in any. Like knowing one painting from all major artists, but not knowing second and third from anyone. Being able to paint a dog, but not a cat, a man, a castle.
Being such a generalist would not be practical. In fact, it would be useless. Even Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, student of anatomy and engineer. He wasn't archeologist, expert on India, or circus acrobat who can juggle with torches. Da Vinci was specialized too.
What I see in generalists today, are very often general managerial/entrepreneurial skills mixed with some level of expertise in one or two fields. And calling this generalist seems as bad naming practice.
There must be another, better name for this.
I don't think I've ever met anyone who has depth in every field of study, but I don't think this is a fair requirement to be considered a true generalist.
He borrows Hedgehog vs Fox from Isiah Berlin
Now please come up with a measure if an economy is elaborated and functional.
A friend once referred me to a "public transport" measure, which might not be the panacea for defining an economy's success, but it's certainly an interesting take.
I wish I could find the paper / article (I tried), but in essence, the extent to which an economy has implemented effective public transport can be used as a measure of economic success.
Edit: I also completely agree with your first point.
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth - by Buckminster Fuller
Just the first chapter will blow your mind.
https://books.google.co.za/books?id=DqflDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA59&sou...
Link to the full book: https://www.amazon.com/Operating-Manual-Spaceship-Buckminste...
What rubs me the wrong way is the false dichotomy like one can only be a specialist or a generalist. It is always presented as if for example chess players would not even know how to eat. There was a joke in the "Top Gear" about "Stig" racing driver that would fall to the ground if taken out of a car.
There is also much more to it because world is complex. For example I am software developer so for business people I am a specialist. But I am also a "full stack developer" where for my fellow developers I am a generalist. Then I mostly specialize in .NET and Angular.
"I may not be fast, but at least I'm not good."
Personally, I feel like T-shaped individuals are a chimera. I don't know anyone whom I'd considered T-shaped. Maybe it's just my location. I have noticed that even the highest placed engineers at my companies, and I'm talking world leaders in certain areas, often do not like to venture even a little bit outside of their specialization.
> For example I am software developer so for business people I am a specialist. But I am also a "full stack developer" where for my fellow developers I am a generalist. Then I mostly specialize in .NET and Angular.
This I can absolutely agree with. I would not call that a T-shaped person; rather, to me, the above is a generalist. I do think that this depends on a point of view. But T-shaped person signifies that a person has one deep specialization. I'd say that having a deep specialization goes against going wide.
From my observation, I've never seen a person who'd have both deep specialization and be comfortable with other technologies on the side.
It is silly to generalize about which is "better" or more likely to succeed because an "ecosystem" will by design contain both so that as a whole the ecosystem is robust to a variety of unforeseen situations (or nothing happening).
In humans you have people who are specialists or generalists, bold or conservative, jay walkers or rule followers, finicky eaters or people who eat pizza that's been on the counter for a week, gamblers or savers, etc, etc. In every case there will be specific examples that make you think "damn I really wish I'd sunk my life savings into BTC 10 years ago!" but that doesn't make you "right" or "wrong" except in hindsight.
Humans (and other populations) should be judged on the spectrum of behaviors they exhibit and how that allows them to succeed in the specific distribution of challenges they face. Judging individuals seems pretty pointless, I guess, unless you are judging yourself and feeling unhappy with the specific tendencies genetics and your upbringing have dealt you. Anyway, just an interesting thing to consider.
Yes, you cannot predict the future precisely, but if you can estimate, that there is an X chance that in the future 70% specialists and 30% generalists are required, and the population will be 50/50 generalist/specialist, then you can make an informed decision which path should you choose if your goal is money/job security.
You may proven to be wrong, you may turn out not to be a good fit at all in your chosen role, but at least you took a calculated risk, instead of gambling.
T-shaped is largely a made up concept without any real observations, and it sounds good initially but after contemplation it falls apart. One of those urban-legends that keeps circulating in big corps.
A professor at a research university is almost certainly more specialized than a science writer, at least insofar as the science is concerned.
T shaped neatly sidesteps any mention of tradeoffs. Have your cake and eat it too! What utter nonsense. Why not Pi shaped or Comb shaped? (google those - they exist).
In a mature market, be a specialist. Be good at one very popular tool, and specifically solving one problem with it, and you'll find a ton of companies willing to pay you a lot in order to solve that one particular problem quickly.
0: https://hugotunius.se/2020/01/19/the-stalactite-developer.ht...
Some things do come at the cost of others, but I think you'll be surprised how many proficiencies you can come up with in a life well lived.