Tech skillsets: Go deep or go wide? (Part 2/2)

There are plenty of reasons, though, to choose to generalize rather than specialize. And by that, I mean good reasons, not things like a lack of focus or a limited attention span.

The case for generalizing over specializing

It's dangerous to put all your eggs in one basket. An extreme example is if programmers specialized in VBScript to the exclusion of all else. The probability of those programmers having a job as of 2023, are approaching zero. I love VBScript, but it is what it is. Professionally, I cut my teeth on ASP and VBScript back in the 2000s. But what would have happened had I stubbornly refused to branch out? The thought makes me shudder.

Speaking of branching out, what makes it relatively easy for me to pick up new programming languages and frameworks is that I've been doing it repeatedly over the years. Instead of focusing on one specific thing to get good at, I identified certain things one new area had with the one I already knew, and worked from there. Got my fingers in as many related pies as possible. And as I learned more new stuff, my frame of reference only got stronger. All the stuff I learned, fed into each other. It's unclear just how good I would be at picking up new stuff if I had specialized instead.

Fingers in many pies.

The other advantage being a generalist gave me, was that I got plenty of attention from cheapskate financially strapped employers who saw the wisdom of getting me to do many different things at once, because I was decent at all those things. And often, for small startups, that's just what they need. The end result was that even in poor economic times, I rarely had trouble finding employment. I did not have to apply only for front-end jobs, or back-end jobs. I could apply to all of them.

Back in the day, I had been working for a law firm and maintaining their corporate website as one of my many duties. When I eventually left for greener pastures, the guy they hired to replace me was a more accomplished network infrastructure guy. More specialized, I would say. I went on to ply my trade as a web developer, but occasionally I would check back on my former company's corporate website to see what was shaking. Imagine my surprise one day when I went to the ABOUT US page where the hotshot attorneys were presented, and found a whole bunch of distorted profile photos! And that was after waiting a good couple minutes for all these images to load.

Apparently my replacement not only did not understand optimizing images for the internet, he also did not know about resizing images to fit the HTML img tag placeholders. He had simply taken the photographs he had been presented with, and used them as-is.

Was that his fault? No, not at all. My then-Manager had specifically wanted a network specialist, as opposed to me, a web developer who could follow simple network instructions. And his wish had been granted. But specialization comes at a cost. Things like image optimization for the web, just weren't covered in the guy's extensive networking knowledge. In the job, not only had I needed to help with network and infrastructure, I'd had to develop web applications and maintain websites, and my skillset had grown accordingly. These were the things the company had learned to take for granted where my position was concerned.

Ultimately...

Let me just say it again - the industry needs both specialists and generalists. Without generalists, specialists would have trouble plugging all the other technical gaps that their very specific skillsets do not cover. Hiring specialists for every area just isn't practical. On the other hand, without specialists, it would be devilishly hard for just generalists to raise the quality of the product to its optimal level.

Most of all, it would be really difficult to be a specialist in a world without generalists. And vice versa. Not only are both needed, the two need each other.

Specially for you,
T___T