Ask HN: Do you regret being a generalist?

I don’t. And generalist is a flexible term. For my career it means frontend, or backend, team lead, or IC. There have been a few points where I thought “I don’t ever want to write browser code again” and “all I want to do is UI”. I’ve built shopping carts, government tax websites, worked in automotive, and now I build tools to manage robots. I suspect if I had been narrow in my field I wouldn’t have had the opportunities that I’ve enjoyed.

I sometimes think a narrower, deep specialization might have yielded a bigger paycheck, but overall I think I’m happier being able to explore broader fields and concepts.

As a final note I’ll say that you’ve got plenty of time to generalize and then decide to specialize. Bring in your early twenties is far more time than it feels like right now.

Nope.

Mid thirties and being a generalist means that not only am I employable, my breadth of experience allows me to bring together things from places others would be unaware of.

I occasionally wish i was more of a specialist, but usually chalk it up to the sort of all pervading impostor syndrome that goes on in software development circles.

If someone wants to put me in a position based on my current skills where I end up becoming an expert and they pay for that time, then it will happen. Otherwise I'll just keep learning enough to be useful in dozens of smaller ways. From the browser's JS engine event handling at the bottom of Flux/Redux to how Kubernetes works and how to do useful stuff with it, to 3D printer firmware and how my drill press works.

Why do you have no doubts about your employability? When I was in my early twenties I felt pretty much the same way, but then the rest of my twenties proved different

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.

  - write an effective contract and be able to tell if one that someone hands you is reasonable
  - be able to explain to people you feel some responsibility towards how to install and operate a VPN
  - have a grip on basic statistics and economics
  - cook a tasty meal from grains, legumes, vegetables and/or fungi

Become a DevSecOps engineer. Your skills set are in demand because you understand all three important areas

No. The demands for specialized roles shift from epoch to epoch, but being smart on negotiation, strategy, sales, marketing, and communication will never go away.

Not at all! Every time I think I might’ve doubted it I’m blessed to be able to continue generalizing out of whatever specialized corner my career seems to head towards, and to continue to be effective doing meaningful work.

Being a generalist certainly makes cocktail parties more interesting. Being a little good at everything makes you more employable as well, you don't get locked into 1 niche. The T-shaped person is the ideal. You should be great at 1 thing and decent at many other things, but always keep the T-shape. Keep an identity to center your varied experiences around. It will keep the main thing and the auxiliary things interesting in tandem.

I'm mid thirties, went from full stack dev to DevOps to sre. No real regrets on not specializing in a field, however I do wish I had spent more time contributing to some specific open source project that's heavily used. I think generalist knowledge + in depth knowledge of some widely used codebase would be a bit more lucrative.

Yes and no. No, because I think being a generalist has allowed me to offer value and insights that set me apart from others. I like knowing a bit about everything and I think my willingness to learn and explore has worked out really well.

On the flipside, before I moved to my current company, I did struggle with promotions at times because I wasn’t seen as a specialist in any one area. The overall value that I saw in being a generalist and that others used to their advantage wasn’t rewarded the same way as it was for peers who were focused on just one thing.

So I don’t regret it and I do think there is real value in being a generalist. But be prepared to have to work harder to show that value to others.

Heck no I regret nothing.

I can program anything, bring me your dead and I will raise it.

Specializing, that's called a job. Work is work and they have a stack you gotta use, better or worse.

No one can take the hacker out of the hacker though.

My resume in terms of languages basically goes back in time, where I'm "expert" of what I use every day, but what I haven't used for a while I just put "good".

How do you sell yourself as a specialist to a company with a stack? Simple, "I don't know X but I'm keen to learn. I'm sure I can scale up to it". If they pass on you, it wasn't meant to be. As a job, your job is to return higher value than your cost. If you do that within a team, you're a net positive. Whether it's by teaching what you know as an expert, of coming up and scaling up to help wherever you can.

Either way, there are very few stacks that are permanent enough that you could be an expert in the matter for decades. Things simply move too fast.

So get behind any shiny new stack that you fancy and become a subject expert, it might pay the bills in 5 years. If not, you probably learnt transferable skills. At the end of the day, no matter the language, stack, team, we're just all trying to get the computer to do X.

I'm a generalist that also knows business and UX. It does cut me off from some jobs, and I am fine with that, I would probably get bored by those jobs anyway. Follow your interests where they may take you. The IT industry is vast and needs all sorts of people, might as well go with what makes you happy.

Think about the breadth of your experience with perspective of where you want to land. You sound like a person that likes learning and applying SW tech. That is great for a generalist role or a maybe a CTO of a varied SW tech stack. Is that trajectory where you want to land? If you want to be in a role where you need to be responsible for multi-disciplinary stacks, you don't sound like a generalist. For SW, you do. I hope your experiences line you up for the role you want.

A generalist technologist has a lot of uses. I successfuløy employ myself as a generalist technologist and let Subject matter expert or coders take over when we go deeper into these territories.

Follow your passion for technology it almost cannot go wrong if you learn by being passionate and work in tech.

No. Being a generalist is awesome. I get to follow wherever my interests lead and I'm interested in a lot of things. I don't know what I would do with myself if I had to focus on one narrow piece of it for years on end.

What I do regret is not being better at marketing and sales. It has been difficult to find work at times because I don't fit neatly into an employable box.

The more different things anyone does over time, the more you become a generalist.

It reminds me of a quote where an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less. That seems true for specialists and generalists.

Generalists can connect dots between unrelated that specialists might not.

Generalists can build and connect many layers.

The chasing of shiny objects slows down once you start seeing how little is actually new.

Serving the solving of problems that make a positive impact for users is important to know what generalists can do that’s very unique. This helps inform what you might want to go deep in vs broad.

For me it was the realization that most software tends to answer one question in many ways: Where is everything at? It became the connector to people and what they were after.

Also during the pandemic, it seemed generalists were able to learn how to learn and contribute some very unique solutions.

The subsequent change in society will require not just specialists who focus on one thing or way.

Generalists roll with the change at both as big picture and in details.

You need both and I don’t think the specialist is better than the generalist, or vice versa.

No. The only thing I regret along my career path is being officially diagnosed with a mental illness during a hospitalization, which led me to missing work without notice, which caused me to become abruptly unemployed (and, eventually, unemployable). And despite the fact that my career ended abruptly and without warning, I regret nothing else. There is no downside to learning new things, even if they don't have immediate application to your life. Even if they never do. Learning is worthwhile for its own sake (at least in my opinion).

No, it makes me more valuable to startups.

I’m a 0 to 10 engineer, 10 to 50 is rough, 50 to 90 is boring and 90 to 100 is like watching paint dry for me. If you want to be valuable for the startups that need 0 to 50, you need to wear some different hats.

You also need to know yourself. Figure out what you love in this and do that, you’ll never be burned out or bored. When I’m in the right place, I can happily code all night, do 2 Months of work in a day. When I hate my job, I struggle to create anything, it all feels like work.

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.

Yes and no,I have done frontends, backends, cloud, devops, ux, project/program/product management, sales , product development,I helped one startup to grow from 0 to 100 and another startup from 0 to acquisition and made good money, but from a job perspective the only option to progress in my career is to start something of my own, I can't find a company who needs a person like me, so generalist is a good path if you want to start your own but specialisation is better for job growth

No, from the perspective that it has allowed me to take on interesting projects that were otherwise impossible. In my case, by linking tools from different fields (spectroscopy, computer vision, chemistry, medicine, human systems hacking, ...) and getting something viable together. Once we demonstrate viability and need, we then build a team of specialists to flesh out the details.

Yes, in that that you have to sell yourself carefully. "I solve any problem" is not generally reassuring, because it is always an approximation, and because a specialist might see the pitfalls of a particular approach earlier. Given time you will become a specialist in whatever tool, but that needs to be built into projects or your professional development budget.

I don't regret it at all, but finding high paying roles can be a little more difficult. Its a tradeoff though, because after a few years at a role its often seen how valuable you actually are so in bad economic times you may be the last to get cut.

I also think generalists get pushed into management at a higher frequency. Not something I am personally interested in, but I get asked yearly at least at every role I have been at.

I"m actually in much the same situation (young SWE, generalist, interested in AI), and I find it's really beneficial especially in a startup space. My resume can seem all over the place, but I find that startups tend to prefer someone who has demonstrated the ability to learn quickly and deeply.

I've been looking for others to talk about it with, so I'd be happy to discuss further.

Well, I do think it is more challenging to reach the highest individual contributor pay grades as a generalist. On the other hand, being the one person in the org that understands how all the pieces play together and can debug all up and down the stack brings a lot of value and is eventually recognized. I now work in robotics, and being able to chase bugs through mechanical, sensor behavior, electrical, firmware, drivers, software, across ethernet, CAN bus, config files, calibration extrinsics, closed loop controllers... etc.... being that kind of bug hunter is valued and has worked out well for me. I feel zero age discrimination in my role, despite needing 7 bits to hold my age.

I'm also in my early 20s. I'm personally aiming for being very good at a few things with a lot of very high level background knowledge. Basically an extreme T-shape.

1) I believe that not having a clear competency will make it harder for people to place you. Your experience is a lot more legible if you're the "React guy", "C guy", "AI guy", etc.

2) Trying a bit of everything is very different from being good at everything. Is "a bit of x" useful? From what I've seen, no. It's not a unique differentiator, it's easily replicable and it doesn't provide much value. Being good at a few different things seems like a different ballgame though.

3) If you are a very broad generalist it will close a lot of doors for particular work. If you are highly specialized it will close a lot of doors for particular work as well. AI/ML for instance, seems like the kind of field that will be closed to you unless you specialize in it. On the other hand, building full products is something that seems more inaccessible to specialists.