Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
nytimes.com
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I started off in the software field as a developer. I've been in the software field for almost 10 years but I've only actually spent two years as a full time developer. I've also done project management, product management, marketing, customer support, and management. I find myself struggling to fill one of those individual roles because I don't have the same level of experience as those who have dedicated themselves to those for the full ten years.
I'm currently a VP of Engineering for a small company. I know most would probably say that I've made it, but I'm looking for my next opportunity and struggling. It's hard to get a job at a larger (200+ employee) company as each role filled is expected to be specialized and focused. At a smaller company or startup, though, I kick the crap out of anyone else applying because I know so much more about the business in general and can wear many different hats.
In addition, I feel a strong benefit is that my experience enhances my ability in each other role. For instance, if I'm working on a marketing email campaign, I can use my developer skills to pull relevant data from the application that helps me focus my targeting. If I'm developing, I will specifically build small helpful tools for customer support and marketing departments because I already know what they want and they don't know they can have it. It takes a small amount of time but provides a big value.
I would probably also have a leg up on starting my own business compared to someone who has a deep specialized knowledge of enterprise level applications but no idea how to put together a customer support and good user experience.
Still, we are always looking at the greener grass, and there are times when I wish I could just apply for a senior developer role at a larger company and focus on one thing. Somehow, I don't think that my lack of React experience will be made up for by letting them know that I will be able to directly interact with the customers or set up marketing campaigns. They already have 5+ people doing those things.
So, if you want positions at large organizations, there will be more demand for specialists, and the reverse is true with small organizations. Whether you made a "mistake" or not, depends on whether you would rather work at small organizations, or large ones.
Note: yes, there are a minority of generalists at large organizations, and a few specialists at small ones, but the percentages are very different.
This could vary from finding /building a pc for a new start when some one had forgotten to order a pc for them, fixing the BACS tape, doing initial deployments of systems including taking enough kit with us to build a network in case that had been forgotten.
The most interesting one was cracking nt4 to break into a client system - I got a break just on a power mac and didn't need to actually use all our sun workstations after ours to run a distributed attack (BT security / Squirrels) might have not been to happy (yes I did get authorisation)
I am a consultant, and i go through this process every new project. It isn't just getting a new job, its about new projects too at the same company.
It sounds really hard, politically.
I've done a lot of Rails then dived deep into mobile dev (native iOS & Android). I also dealt a bit with embedded and ended up as the bridge between a taiwanese team and a french one. Contractor life can be interesting :p
As you, I sometimes wish I could just stay in one role in a bigger company but I feel like I would not be able to fit in a box for long.
On these lines generalists "generally" win. I find that when people talk about generealists vs specialists they focus more on number of things they can do. But its more important how you define the skill. You knowing and correctly identifying the data set for marketing team is way more valuable than actually being responsible for querying and putting the data together. Personally I try to spend more time on defining my tasks clearly, so that I can maximise my impact on the organisation. Hopefully this framework is of some help and you can relate to it. All the best friend!
The other big one I see is that at a certain point companies can afford to shift from "duct tape it till we get funding" to "we have funding, we can spend time engineering solutions." Which also means that they go slow, write way more docs, etc.
I would not assume that individuals working as specialists for 10 years in a field are actually specialists. Too frequently I encounter individuals who have plateaued while their peers have actually become true specialists. There are many reasons why this happens, but rightly or wrongly, many specialists aren't what you might think they are. I'm sure a lot are actually anxious about their own abilities.
I'd personally suggest evaluating whether you are able to better set boundaries. Making a progressive change to your role is often a possibility but it needs understanding and navigation. That way you can keep what you like and get more of what you want. Switching to just being a senior developer as you've framed it might not be actually what you want, and there are alternatives to get what you want.
On starting your own business you have to come to terms with not doing everything. If you are successful you will get away from anything that is originally fun and desirable. A senior developer mentors folks and derives satisfaction from that activity. The trade-off is often less focused coding and delivery. They are technical leaders with more flexibility in how their work may look.
Your observation on running a business is good, but the key is the feelings that you'll have. If you are too tied actually doing particular tasks versus running a business you'll not be able to succeed. Also, be careful about putting down enterprise app developers. They often have a side gig outside of work that the stability enables. They also know how certain parts of big businesses function which would give your business a leg up. Startup people have good talk about product-market fit, but there are many companies you don't hear about being acquired which involve some enterprise software product that a startup would never land on. That said, the upsides to the approach are different.
Another option is that you can start your own (you mention this too). It doesn't have to be solo. From the experience you describe, it seems like you could partner with a technical cofounder and really compliment their skills. There's a lot to gain from experience like that and it can open the door to a lot of opportunities in the future that you don't know about right now.
You haven't made a mistake. You can provide a lot of value to an organization. You just have to find the right opportunity where you can do so.
But it's kind of sad that the place where I can get the most value is seemingly the place where my skills will be utilized the least. It just seems... strange.
Think of it like this: The kinds of lawyers who get a lot of "on retainer" type work are the best ones. Because those people will not often utilize those lawyers, but they want to make sure they're available when needed, because when needed, they need the best of the best and they need them now.
Google is treating you the same way. They want to make sure they best of the best are available for them when needed, and not available for anyone else. By paying you $MAX_COMP, they ensure that you're there when they need you, and its a cost that is worth it to them. They hope that you do some great things for them in the interim.
Your reasoning sounds right.
Like buying a perfectly functioning goldmine, only to close it solely to drive up the price of gold.
But you can have one of you want one.
A common reason people do 20% work is to test the waters of another area of the company. It's also a kind of tryout for you.
You do tell your manager in this case, yes. They're not supposed to say no. Hard to say what the range of responses is in practice. In my experience managers are supportive of this.
Not using all of your skills can be a concern but you will gain new skills.
So... not that I think it's necessarily easy but how did you score such a lucrative gig at google? How can I do the same? Do they hire generalists? Thanks.
If you study Cracking the Coding Interview, and you know that book inside and out, and you feel confident you can solve all of the questions in it (you can ignore the Java/C++ stuff if you're not applying for one of those jobs) -- you have a /chance/ to get hired.
But there's lots of smart people with those skills who fail the interview every day.
I'm in europe, I guess we are a bit behind on the pay scales but that's an absolutely incredible amount of money to me; I'm genuinely curious what you're being paid to do for that level of compensation...
A CRUD ceases to be a CRUD when one is dealing with Google-like scale and/or arbitrarily complex requirements behind each of those letters in the acronym!
There are no European companies on the list.
Companies that make enormous profits per employee can pay top employees a lot of money.
When people wonder why Americans work so much part of the reason is that these people desperately want to make it to the top where the rewards are lucrative. Is this rational? Probably not, because the top seems to get smaller in every field and most don't make it.
Also take a look at the BigLaw Profits per Partner. Top equity partners can make $4 million+ because they are at the top of a pyramid. Mostly this is in the US
Personally, I don't think I'd ever give up a software engineering job for a managerial position even if the compensation was higher.
Where these compensation packages are given so frequently (SV), it is very meaningful. It's the difference between being able to buy a home vs being forced to rent a 1-bedroom apartment.
Mortgage payments gets you equity on your home, which goes a long way in retirement. Rent payments disappear, and you will have to continue to pay rent when retired.
I would like to add that after I stopped saying yes to everything, my career took a upward trend. It wasn't until I said: you know what I'm python-django specifically django developer, and won't do anything else, that I started getting progressively better jobs in the area I'm actually an expert on.
Then there is the business cut cost part of it, which annoys the hell out of me. Most managers will (conveniently) tell you should be open to learning new things, because "personal growth"... the reality of the situation is that you will end up over working yourself to death covering responsibilities that should be for a new team mate.
What I mean with upward trend is that I can negotiate conditions like benefits (remote, insurance etc... ) and a better salary, etc..
When I get bored I rewrite my cv and maybe skill up a bit on my own time (or at work) and re-emerge as a new xxx
I’ve gone from support to ops to development to ops to development to devops and I can tell you that I am 100 times more valuable in any role than someone who has specialised for ten years in the same role.
Being a generalist rules, embrace it and get with it just decide what you want to do next and make it happen.
YOU WILL BE AWESOME AT IT BECAUSE YOU HAVE DONE LOTS :) it
In my mind a generalist is someone who e.g. knows quant finance up to hedge fund snuff and knows how to configure wsgi/asgi servers with nginx; can read and rebate legal documentation and use an SMT solver. I don't feel that anyone who hasn't eg watched the recent Jordan Peterson/Slavoj Zizek debate and has a working understanding of Ripser and UMAP can call himself a generalist.
I watched that debate and found it a tedious rehashing of tired old talking points and straw men criticisms of Capitalism/Marxism. To use that in any way of a yardstick of intellectual depth seems odd.
The first hour was Jordan Peterson making a hacky point that capitalism is good and communism's not and Zizek doing Keith Jarret-type improv touching on a thousand topics. Then in the actual debate rounds Zizek got Jordan Peterson to agree with him.
It was an actual debate. There was a winner and not in the sense of a rap battle. The loser was happy to have had it.
Why is the term "generalist" so tightly constrained in your mind?
Nothing wrong with smaller companies and startups, but the pay increase and resources available in a larger company are something I would like to experience. Getting my foot in the door is a frustration though.
Both times it was as a contractor. The first time I was employed by a body shop as just simple staff augmentation. This was in the 2000s, but I believe they are still around. I think if I'd wanted to convert to full time it would have been a process, but I definitely got to meet employees and managers from the bigco (and connect to them on linkedin).
The second time was in the mid 2010s when a friend was at a big company (his startup had been acquired and then acquired again). The friend was able to intro me directly to the hiring manager's manager. We had a friendly conversation, I had a quick tech screen and they brought me in. That would have been no trouble at all to convert to FTE (in fact they had a conversation with me that began with, paraphrasing: "how much do you like money?").
I think the best way into a larger company as a generalist beyond the early stage of their career is an acquihire, but the second best is as a contractor. Risk is lower all around (well, except for you).
When some of the contractors went FTE at a previous role, their salaries dropped dramatically (though they were paying for their own health insurance through an agency).
The main topic discussed in this book, i.e. breadth vs depth is perenial delima also recasted in multiple forms such as exploitation vs exploration. There is no magic bullet in one side or another. The art of getting somewhere is very delicate balance between two. The best approach that has worked for people is either get lucky or find people who have made mistakes, analyze their mistake and, of course, get little bit less lucky.
I must be what the author calls "a well-rounded mediocrity", because my career path is nowhere near as direct as that, if I could be said to have a career at all.
Allow me to try to help alleviate that mistake feeling. :)
I specialised the feck out of my role[s] over the last x > decade, becoming an "expert" in Exchange in a FAANG (one guess as to which one).
It got to the point where I was debugging native code issues in Windows and making code changes to the Exchange product (as a whole), which was distributed across the world.
Now, during this time, the "cloud" went from being a niche thing to being the predominant player in the market. So, whilst I was !pde.deep in a thread, people were learning CI/CD, Azure, AWS, etc.
So, imagine my dismay at having one day been asked to seek opportunities elsewhere and, resultantly, coming to find the descriptions and requirements for "Software Developer" or "SRE" positions in the "real world".
Niche skills are good because they take years to develop and you learn skills that can help you understand/rationalise other areas that you may not have gotten before that experience occurred - but those skills can also become antiquated, quite quickly.
No one's looking for anyone who can debug native or managed software clients, anymore. No one's even looking for SDETs, anymore, it seems.
In other words, on paper, code changes/fixes that have been delivered to millions of people might be somewhat impressive but the lack of any CI/CD in production use (because other teams owned that) means an even more glaring "hole" in my experience - that someone else has and could more easily fill that role.
Companies want "right now", not "has the potential to learn this skill very easily and very quickly".
So, I had to have a huge learning curve transitioning back to the common market (and that's not a complaint, by the way, just an observation), which hindered my ability to obtain gainful employment for quite some time.
So, don't think of it as a mistake. Compared to you, I think that I've made the mistake: I'm envious of those who shifted around the start-ups and amassed quite a bit of skills, which made them far more relevant and marketable to the current market.
Remember the ‘10,000 Hours’ Rule for Success? Forget About It
They should not have said that. I don't know whether 10K is the actual number, but I got good at two things that I was never naturally good at, simply through years of brute force repetition: coding and writing.
I was never a born hacker -- I struggled with Visual Basic when I was 21. But 15 years and maybe 300,000 lines of code later, I have an extremely high degree of proficiency in both C++ and JavaScript, with a good level of proficiency in Java, Python and Golang. I was extremely bad at writing. So much so my fingers used to sweat when I came to the essay section of any test. But after about a decade of keeping a personal journal, I would like to think I write rather well.
Anecdotal yes, but speaking personally, I would not discount the 10,000 hours concept.
"The way that chess works makes it what's called a kind learning environment. So, these are terms used by psychologist Robin Hogarth. And what a kind learning environment is, is one where patterns recur; ideally a situation is constrained--so, a chessboard with very rigid rules and a literal board is very constrained; and, importantly, every time you do something you get feedback that is totally obvious--all the information is available, the feedback is quick, and it is 100% accurate. Right? And this is chess. And this is golf. You do something: all the information is available; you see the consequences. The consequences are completely immediate and accurate. And you adjust accordingly. And in these kinds of kind learning environments, if you are cognitively engaged you get better just by doing the activity. On the opposite end of the spectrum are wicked learning environments. And this is a spectrum, from kind to wicked. Wicked learning environments: often some information is hidden. Even when it isn't, feedback may be delayed. It may be infrequent. It may be nonexistent. And it maybe be partly accurate, or inaccurate in many of the cases. So, the most wicked learning environments will reinforce the wrong types of behavior."
Constructing valid experiments in software development is incredibly easy. Add an assert, recompile, and see if it gets triggered.
We programmers consider it unacceptably painful if testing a hypothesis takes ten minutes.
Real life is never that clean or easy.
That's a sign something is wrong.
Even for that, though, if you define your criteria for success, it's mostly possible to measure the outcomes and learn whether your approach was successful or not. One key there is remembering that subjective metrics are valid - user happiness and developer happiness are two of the most useful ones I know of for measuring the system's overall health and effectiveness, and while they're not objective, they can still be measured reasonably quickly and regularly.
For fields like public policy, though, there are just so many confounding factors and the timeframes are so long that it becomes nightmarish, maybe even impossible, to genuinely learn anything. The subjective metrics of citizen happiness and functionary happiness that are analogous to my software ones above are worthless because of rollout times measured in years or decades and the infinite array of factors, confounding and otherwise, that go into people's satisfaction with society.
Even relatively straightforward things like farming have learning cycles measured in years for things like crop rotations.
The universe is just not a friendly learning environment.
Programming is an aberration in almost every respect, as a product of the human mind that can actually have useful impacts in the world (most friendly environments are human constructs that are not "useful" per se, like board games or musical performance or sports).
In fact, if you choose one strongly typed language and one weakly typed to know in depth (eg Java and JS) it's really easy to move to others.
The trap that people fall into is that they focus too much on learning the ins and outs of a framework and not the important concepts. Or they are stuck in a problem domain that's very thin on CS concepts, like web dev or frontend dev. You don't learn concepts that make it easy to transition.
From my own experience, focusing on CS and math (esp. stats) and systems programming have made it really easy to move around.
Like before things like generics and lambda expressions C#/Java were quite different to Python/Ruby, and js used to be quite an abysmal language but with some nice features nothing else had (still is an awful language to an extent). I think C# 2.0 and 3.5 really changed that language for the better, Java spent a lot of time getting to the C# 3.5 level.
And I remember a time when C++ was almost incomprehensible if you'd never worked in it, but now it seems to be a lot less daunting as you've got bridging languages like Rust and Go.
I must admit I've still no interest in Haskell/F#/etc. I tried Lisp about 10 years ago and it just seemed such a pain, for me I find imperative programming so much easier to map out complex interactions in my head. I also find set based programming like SQL very easy. But functional, ugh.
For multithreading, I would take functional over imperative any day though. The multithreaded code I write in Java ends up looking like functional code by way of chaining futures, but it is still hindered by the use of shared memory and synchronization (or lack thereof).
I enjoy C++, and the additions in C++ 11 and 14 are mostly good ones. But they don't do anything to make the language more approachable IMO.
Coding is something you can learn on your own with a tool, some books or manuals, and time. The compiler provides a lot of feedback, debuggers and manuals give you a lot of information to develop your skillset. A few books on algorithms and data structures and specific domains (like graphics or network) will get you to a solid point as a programmer.
But developing systems that are high quality, multi-component, interacting with other complex systems, and sustainable is another thing altogether. It is costly, tradeoffs are sometimes non-intuitive, and you probably need to have a mentor or a good work environment to really get skilled at it, or the right kind of analytical mind. But you'll still have a lot of failures along the way and need to develop a lot of different skills.
Usually you get feedback within 1/2 a year. That complicated search system with your own fantastic DSL an absolute nightmare to modify? Kind feedback. Your system works fine with 100 users but falls over with 10,000? Kind feedback. You used a trendy new js framework that disappeared 2 years later? Kind feedback.
And better still our industry has tons of people who write lots of books or do podcasts or do conferences where they talk about how their projects went wrong, and how they fixed them. Whether it was the GoF design patterns, or Code Complete or one of the many others.
To me, all of that is clearly kind feedback.
Persistence will make you a master in a skill -- and you can do it almost subconsciously afterwards.
It doesn't give you a broader culture and overview of the world though. Or at least, it rarely does.
What a weird analogy, as if spending all night pointlessly digging hole in your background correlates with wealth. Though I think if you did have the grit to do that you will find success in many endeavors.
It takes hard work to go from nothing to something. People doing the hard work are not confused about what’s meaningful.
Not sure why you find it weird. There are a lot of hard working people out there. And very few of them ever go "from nothing to something" as you put it.
Around here "work smart, not hard" is a mind-blowing revelation for many. And it bears repeating since people forget it regularly.
If that were true, every startup would be successful.
Source: Someone who struggled with writing and became better with practice. :)
Edit: I just want to point out that getting better at "writing" in the broadest sense is very different than getting better at specific kinds of writing, like academic or journalistic, where particular patterns are important and much more difficult to self-teach.
But none of that means you will be able to reach a certain audience. Although I have to say, I care very little about that. Good technical writing which is appreciated by my colleagues -- and being eloquent and expressive in casual conversations -- is good enough for me.
Relevant quote by Ira Glass: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/309485-nobody-tells-this-to...
Edit: I'm not a native speaker of English.
I think it also matters a lot the type of career market you're in and that can be hard to define.
https://medium.com/the-unstudent/career-markets-82fb42694869
In a winner-take-all market, the criteria by which you succeed is quite narrowly defined & agreed upon and there are very limited slots. It's then a matter of optimizing for those criteria (e.g. publication quality in universities or TV screenwriting). In an auction market, there's many different approaches and criteria (e.g. VC investing, design, software engineering) and lots of ways to create new kinds of positions. The creator of Dilbert (Scott Adams) chronicled his journey being in auction market (writing cartoons):
"It’s unlikely that any average student can develop a world-class skill in one particular area. But it’s easy to learn how to do several different things fairly well. I succeeded as a cartoonist with negligible art talent, some basic writing skills, an ordinary sense of humor and a bit of experience in the business world. The “Dilbert” comic is a combination of all four skills. The world has plenty of better artists, smarter writers, funnier humorists and more experienced business people. The rare part is that each of those modest skills is collected in one person. That’s how value is created. "
Is it possible some of the allure of being a polymath and a generalist a bit of confirmation bias? I empathize with the worry over increased specialization, so a book with the message "specialists suffer, generalists win" feels very good.
i think “generalist” misses the point about deep non-technical skills.
Personally I feel that some of the gaming lingo fits really well in the real world but it might be just me.
Indeed, in technical fields such as those we often discuss on HN, it is almost impossible for anyone beyond novice experience levels not to have greater depth of skill and understanding in some areas but also to pick up general knowledge and basic skills across a much broader range of areas. I'm not a big fan of the T metaphor specifically, because I think it misleadingly suggests than an individual will only develop much greater skills and knowledge in a single area or perhaps closely related areas, but the underlying premise makes sense: there isn't really any such thing as a pure specialist in technical work, because you are inevitably exposed to many related areas even if your focus is on one specific aspect.
There's a lot to say about striking a nerve and being at the right place at the right time. Luck, basically, just with the option to keep trying.
Adams would (probably) have been nowhere if he'd been making hilariously cynical cartoons about trout farming.
And in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is a king.
Unfortunately, I find this approach sort of flies in the face of human nature or perhaps just my nature and anecdotes. I enjoy digging down into subjects and fields well beyond a surface skim, but I find digging to the depths gives me little satisfaction. I start to get a bit of diminishing returns of enjoyment as the more depth I desire, time investment begins to increase (in a non-linear fashion). I would also add that in many areas I've studied, you reach a point where the information and knowledge is no longer certain and then various opinions begin to branch out from experts in the field and I find this is usually a good stopping point.
As such, most subjects reach a point where I decide it's time for something new: I've learned many of the important aspects and if I need them at some point or have new found interest, I have a great starting point.
I don't think business rewards specialists. The business people (at the top) are generalists. They can recognize some specialization but not too deep. Whether you have only one eye or two eyes, they will not be able to tell the difference.
> you reach a point where the information and knowledge is no longer certain and then various opinions begin to branch out from experts in the field
I would argue this is the horizon of the expertise. There might be deeper expertise behind this horizon, but you cannot see it because you cannot make sense of the different opinions (without more expertise).
You're not the only one that feels this way. I love the deep dives into a given topic, but at some point it just becomes too much and/or uncertain/divergent.
This is a false premise, at least when stated so generally.
Look at Google, a company that is known for compensating workers quite well. They mostly hire generalist software engineers, which I think is due to a combination of reasons:
- Google is a big established company where a lot of the work is not the sexiest in the industry. This means that people don't necessarily want to stick around in the same team forever. This means people need to switch teams every few years in order to keep their job interesting, which is much easier for a generalist.
- Generalists can specialize and go back to different work later if it makes sense. It's harder for people starting out as specialists to do this.
- There's uncertainty as to what projects will be available to work on in the future. This means that specific kinds of specialists may not always be needed.
- Many teams aren't big enough to contain all the specialists you might need for the project. Having people who can wear many hats solves this problem.
When looking at this like coaches and players, players are often the experts and coaches are often the generalists. We all know, though, in business, coaches tend to get paid WAY more. So it behooves most players to become experts, in order to be the best player, so that one day their efforts will get rewarded and they can ascend to coach-dome.
But there are many, many coaches that were never experts. Some of which are privileged psycho-sociopaths who have worked their way up the coach ladder by playing that game, which is a different exercise entirely.
This leads you to the question, is it better to be a coach-coach or a player-coach? Furthermore, how does a new coach (who is not a sociopath) compete against both coaches and players trying to be the next coach? Where is the lane for the natural, generalist coach?
All lanes are hard, but the generalist-coach lane is very hard for those without an MBA, and without certain cut-throat tactics, which seem to be the base playing rules in that lane. Then, even if you get the title, earning the respect of the player-experts is another challenge.
Generalists may have their day, and lanes-per-niche may be more or less difficult for generalists, but it is not such a triumph. From my perspective, at least.
Be very careful with this. I've been in the same boat but it's not one you can ride forever, the older you get the bigger the physical toll this is gonna take on your body.
Consider looking for an alternative that isn't as "hard", cannabis can be that once you found a good strain for you (Sativa weighted hybrids) and a reliable supplier for it.
Sadly that's pretty much impossible if you ain't living in a place where it's legalized. Illegal drug suppliers are rarely known for the consistency of their products.
I've once gotten 2 grams of pure crystals rather than pills, done a lot of research (the "limitless" movie inspires to invest in such a research first, reddit and quora are great places to start), experimented a lot (with practices and supplements to take to protect the body from the bad things it does and mitigate tolerance growth) and came to the point when I could marathon for a week without sleeping without even having hangover once I stop. The feelable negative results were (after I've found a proper way) almost none but over-concentration (narrowed mental view), disregulated blood sugar and butt ache caused by 22x7 concentrated working sitting on a chair. Nevertheless I stopped and don't use it and my actual working dose I used on some occasions (but the experiments) to concentrate for hours was almost homeopathic - 3 minuscule sand-like specks a day. I've even helped some addicts to quit gracefully.
As for weed (which isn't legal at my location either yet quite easy to get with little or no risk of prosecution - people use to smoke in the streets and cops walking by don't care) I've tried smoking it (in tiny doses, my body is very sensitive to all the substances) regularly for some time but didn't really like it and now I don't even know where to get it (as well as any other illegal substances, the dealers I knew have vanished over time as I was an extremely infrequent buyer and I don't bother to look for new). It made my mind a way less sharp, some strains made me sleepy, some strains made me crazy, the only thing the weed actually was great with for me was sex.
If you happen to know particularly good strain names I'd love to know too, however. I once met a guy who offered 9 different strains and I haven't bought any just because I didn't knew which I could like.
BTW the only thing other than meth that used to help was 1/4 pill of xanax (especially stacked with sunifiram). But it's almost impossible to get. I was lucky to get 4 pills once so I could take it 12 times and leave a pill for for a rainy day. I've also tried bromozepam but it doesn't do the job for me.
Crystal puts a lot of these behaviors into overdrive without you even noticing, regardless of how much you do to alleviate the side-effects, they will still take their toll.
I'm now in my mid 30's, and even tho I haven't done a lot of crystal in my life (probably 3 grams max, I never needed much because the effects were super strong even in tiny doses) I'm now at a point where even the smallest dose will give me troubles with my jaw bones and (otherwise healthy) teeth simply due to the wear and tear of the induced teeth gnawing, it's not something I can or want to do anymore.
For a cannabis alternative, you might want to take a look here [0]. Just be aware that even with a list like that, you will still need to experiment because these effects can vary greatly from individual to individual, so you need to figure out what works best for you.
A good addition to that is CBD oil orally taken when taking a tolerance break (every 3 weeks I take a 1-week break) and can also serve as a life-saver if you ever end up with some strain giving you anxiety/too much of a psychotic high.
As a general rule: Sativas are on the more active end, Indicas are usually the ones sending you to sleep, hybrids can be anything between them.
You might also want to consider a different method of application than smoking if those effects ain't doing it for you. Vaping is healthier and surfaces the effects differently, the same holds true for edibles. Canacaps are not that difficult to prepare, it's just cannabis infused oil put in capsules, but can be very effective (long duration) and you can use them without everybody around you instantly smelling it.
Tho, always be careful with edible dosing, even experienced "stoners" regularly underestimate the potency of edibles.
Take care and I hope there's something useful here that will help you find a more natural remedy to keep you productive and healthy.
[0] https://www.leafly.com/news/strains-products/best-cannabis-s...
Just wanted to say this: supplement [a lot of] magnesium and chew bubble gum :-)
Thanks for the answer and the link.
Look up "Refuse to Choose!" by Barbara Sher. I'm like you and her book(s) taught me that I don't need to feel guilty, self-loath, or suffer insults for being this way.
"I give confidential briefings, you leak, he has been charged under section 2a of the Official Secrets Act"
"I have an independent mind, You are eccentric, He is round the twist."
Apparently Yes Minister isn't the origin of the concept though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation
As an example, I'm looking for a data scientist job and as you might guess, it is a very broad field. So, I thought I would learn the basics of machine learning, deep learning, required maths and programming and then I would search for the job and in whatever field I'll get the job like Natural language processing, computer vision, supply chain analytics, time series analysis, etc. , I would learn that and specialize in that field. But when I started looking for job every start-up wanted that I know current state-of-the-art techniques of their field, which is simply not possible as each start-up specialize in a different set of techniques, for example, some want deep learning, some statistics, some time series analysis, some big data processing frameworks like Apache Spark, some recommendation system and so on and so forth. As a result, I'm still searching for a job and somewhat have lost passion for data science.
So, the only learning that I got from going through this process is whatever field you choose, you have to specialize in that field to have a great career.
"First become a key, then go look for a lock."
Yes, there's risk in that, and no, there's no guarantee that whatever you specialize in will be useful to someone. But the advantage is that you're basically guaranteed to love your job, because you chose the job yourself and then just pitched a lot of corporations to see who was offering it. There's also a self-respect boost to being in the driver's seat and thinking of your career in terms of which organization gets to be lucky enough to have you work for them.
[1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/03/29/the-key-to-act-two/
We have to earn the generalist label - the generalist has his own form of specialization.
From what I’ve seen, the successful generalist’s command over the basics is so strong that you wonder why they never specialized deeper. The generalist has a good mental map of the territory and solves problems very proficiently, though perhaps not as quickly or rigorously as someone more specialized in a specific sliver of the problem domain.
(anecdotal from my own journey learning how to program and initially feeling frustrated by the lack of market for generalists)
When I started, I just couldn't see myself doing the same thing for the rest of my life and I branched out. I took opportunities that presented itself and the ones where I was thrown into (thank you mentors). I did try to specialize in engineering but I went from embedded systems to GUI to front-end to back-end to data (mining/analysis/visualization) to systems design to (developer) operations then ML and technical management. I just can't help but be attracted to the next thing but I don't stick around long enough to be absorbed by it.
I usually start the 'next' thing as a side project or side gig. If it becomes interesting enough I change my main role to it. In a way I've become a specialist at being a generalist.
Fear of the unknown doesn't frighten me, it excites me. Somehow I've come to love chaos and making sense of it. Few people and companies bet on this behaviour of mine and we both walked away with satisfaction and wealth. But life as a generalist hasn't been easy. I've had to deal with imposter syndrome often. Always ended up learning on the job.
It wasn't just jobs/career though... I find myself relocating to new country or continent once every two years. Financially it's a nightmare but its a price I'm willing to pay.
> 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.
Most things are possible for most people to do if they bother and take an interest in it. Quite often people will just throw up their hands and claim they can't do something, rather than rolling up their sleeves and giving it a go.
The second law of thermodynamics indicates that our modern world will only become increasingly more chaos, which certainly seems to have been the case so far, therefore possessing the ability to assess the world with an unbiased mindset and under such clarity can be a huge advantage.
Though the most important value from being a generalist probably comes from getting around the diminishing returns effect. We are approaching a state where it’s becoming harder and harder to generate new knowledge in any particular single field, and yet the possibility and potential to combine existing knowledge between various different fields are rarely explored and still widely open.
Most people only specialize in a single track of expertise, they are either a doctor, a mechanic, or a fisherman, but they are rarely both. Those who possess knowledge of any two industries and are able to effectively combine them together will have the potential to generate a completely new piece of valuable information. This in turn will lead to more creative ideas and innovations. In a world where everything becomes increasingly saturated, this is probably the reason why being a polymath or a generalist is going to become much more desirable in the near future.
Another divide is development and design, those that can do that produce amazing products. You see this more in the gaming or interactive space but it makes you less biased and understanding of the problem points, and best parts of both verticals.
Specialization over generalization is why lots of large software sucks today and small companies or startups win, they employ more generalists, design/develop crossovers and full stack product focused t-shaped employees. When teams are huge, specialized and care is removed. The chaos of more communication channels (N(N-1)/2) encourages just staying in your lane rather than viewing the big picture. Small teams with generalists are where the best products are made due to everyone going beyond their lanes/channels and viewing the big picture.
I think generalization is best in startups or small groups including gaming/interactive especially with hyperfocus on a product. Making the product good in all aspects, and caring about them, from design to development, presentation to production, and especially maintenance and iterative growth. Once that is established, teams can grow and specialize, but innovation and creative growth is harder.
Sports is very unique because it is a lot more physical than intellectual compared to just about anything else. Meaning there are completely different aspects at play when it comes to being top brass.
Prominence in arts and music seems to only be loosely correlated to the raw skill itself. Cue everyone's favorite meme about modern paintings which are just lines.
This means for the average reader this seems not really relevant at all, because there is no proof you can project anything from these people right and wrongdoings to "normal" careers. How to become a top notch wind turbine mechanic? How can I become "that embedded systems guy"? Until someone got more on that, I'm sticking to the 10000 hour thing with a breath and depth that feels right to me...
He mentions Tiger Woods vs. Roger Federer as two ways how you get to greatness. I don't think they are taking into account that maybe both of them are excellent athletes and that whether they started in childhood like Tiger Woods, or after dabbling in different sports like Federer, both thrived once they got into where their talents were.
Also, both have strong parents that pushed them, even if Federer mom didn't want him to play tennis, she is a tennis coach.
Anyhow, I don't think this take into account innate talents enough.
I work in education and there is a strong tendency to now focus on developing cognitive skills which help you to learn something instead of learning something and hoping that this will develop the cognitive skills.
I guess with sports or other mechanical skills (playing an instrument?) it must be a similar thing.
There is a bias in favor of specialization for the economy as a whole. This is why specialists get paid more (engineering major vs English major), in general. However, I consider this a riskier path since specialization is more likely to lead to earlier obsolescence. Thus I would say that there is a bias in favor of being a generalist for the individual, since it keeps more options open. Being a generalist is the safer path, since you can move around more easily, and you're less likely to fall off the top of the hedonic treadmill and lose motivation.
You need to balance specialization - to maximize earnings now - with being a generalist - to maximize earnings later - according to your own risk preferences and external demand for various skills. It is possible to be safe as a specialist if you specialize in something that is in demand for your entire life (such as surgery), and it is possible to be such a generalist that your career never takes off.
That said, as in most things, I think the middle way between extremes is the best way, for the most people.
What's worse is that there seems to be a real push back against serial founders who are looking to transition from founding companies to working for another company. I've A/B tested my resume with changing my latest startup title from Founder to Product Manager and even though the job requirements state extensive startup experience required, being a founder gets rejected for not having the relevant experience, whilst being a Product Manager I get to the next round as my experience matches what they are looking for.
All in all it's becoming a rather depressing affair.
The “intersection of technology and the liberal arts.”
How different might his story have been if Toy Story bombed, Pixar went bust and he never came back to Apple?
Specialist v Generalist is an interesting discussion for sure, but looking at personalities in isolation and ignoring the environmental variables aren't going to help average people decide where on the spectrum they want to end up.
This is sort of like the switch in thinking in AI in the '70s (?) where it became clear that teaching computers to get better and better and playing chess or deducing propositions was never going to produce intelligence, and that we were going to have to teach them to see and move around on their own instead.
Have a lot of salt on hand when getting advice from the successful and famous.
That being said, I frequently worry about this concept of generalist vs specialist and which will yield a better or more impactful career. Despite the negative connotation of the word "generalist", I do believe people that have wide skillsets with some specialty are pretty valuable. But I think it depends on what you want to do and what you want to impact. For inventing a new medication, maybe a speciality is a way to achieve that. For starting a business, maybe generalist is the better toolset.
I think it's ok to be either, I just wish I could be both. :)
I feel that for any end result, you can define the concept of overspecialization. Taking the medication example - you likely want a specialist in biochemistry involved, but if said specialist is actually a specialist of a particular metabolic pathway, they may arrive at a partial solution, and miss the insights that come from being aware of other pathways and how they interact.
Some problems (and I suspect biology already has plenty of them) may also be tricky in the sense that they simultaneously require breadth and depth that's near-impossible for one person to have simultaneously. Those problems will need a mix of extreme specialists with some "less deep" specialists.
The distinguishing feature of the latter is that they are polymaths in the making, a journeyman polymath if you will. They have sufficient depth in multiple fields and produce works that demand attention, whatever that might be. The former, on the other hand, is just a bits and pieces guy living in delusion who doesn't know anything beyond elementary knowledge in his "fields of expertise".
To use a cricketing analogy, since 'tis the season, people like Richards, Tendulkar and Kallis are true alrounders (generalists) whereas people like Robin Singh, Madan Lal and Andy Bichel are just bits and pieces guys who are useful on that odd day when specialists and generalists are having a bad day.
Most people aren't specialists. If they're the academic type, they studied a bunch of things. If they're sporty, they played a bunch of sports. If musical, they tried a bunch of instruments.
You can get pretty good at a number of things without being top of the field. But you don't have to be top of the field to be chosen to do the vast majority of jobs.
Golf vs Tennis: Golfers have won stuff in their late 40s. You're competing with a huge field of experienced people. Tennis players tend to bow out a fair bit sooner, so it makes sense that someone who didn't pour all their energy into it specifically could compete. There's also a question of whether there are specific intransferables in each sport, but I'll leave that to experts.
http://www.econtalk.org/david-epstein-on-mastery-specializat...
The class of 2019 will probably have a career of 45+ years, the economy is only going to get more dynamic and winner take all in my view -- your domain focus will probably have to change every ~8-12 years.
As a programmer, I feel like we have great flexibility in this regard. You can work on mobile, you can work on the cloud, or the web.. in banking, semiconductors.. insurance.. hell, even for government if things get tight.
Which means that you must have a general-enough idea of how permanent some skillset is likely to be. Getting paid to do what you enjoy doing most is great ... until innovation wipes out the demand.
Another danger: over-specialization. You might not want to become an expert in Company A's gear unless those skills will port to openings at B,C and D.
Sure they'll love you today, but will they love you tomorrow?
-- Lazarus Long (Time Enough For Love, Robert Heinlein)
"Polymath" would be a better fit but it's a bit self-aggrandizing.
Given opportunities and resources generalists may outperform but such positions are rare and access is often gated by check for specialization.
What? Politics as much aside as possible, why put him next to Leibniz and Ben Franklin?
I'm surprised that Dunning-Kruger wasn't mentioned here. High-flier generalists are especially vulnerable to self-deception. Their charisma, and the adulation it generates, conceals the consequences of weak understanding of specific topics. This species of generalist is very vulnerable to being blindsided by nuances readily apparent to those who have taken the time and effort to master a topic.
The Dunning-Kruger generalist tends to end up in a position of power, often with disastrous consequences. The current US administration's cabinet is full of them, for example.
In other words, my perspective as a generalist is not that I already know enough about a topic (enough to be dangerous), but rather that I don't know many things but know how to learn quickly.
I think there is some truth that being a generalist requires a degree of confidence and charisma to constantly wade into things out of your depth, but without a healthy dose of fear and respect for the unknown, you're likely to get burned before getting very far.
A Dunning-Kruger generalist just seems like someone who has always gotten lucky with projects and has never had to reckon with running up against their lack of knowledge.
However, specialization will move you further in your lob ladder at a faster pace. The risk is if you specialize in the wrong area, and then that area becomes stale. You'll have a harder time switching to something else.
"Jack of all traits,
Master of none,
Still better than a master of one"
The original phrase is much more against specialisation, however omitting the last two lines makes it almost belittle generalization... The meaning of the phrase has basically reversed over the years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_of_all_trades,_master_of_...
Your wikipedia link says the last line is not included in the original phrase
Whereas it says "Jack of all trades, master of none" (without your recent addition) is from 1721.
See also https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/jack-of-all-trades.html
> Originally, this wasn't the case and the label 'Jack of all trades' carried no negative connotation, the 'master of none' part being added later.
So it went through three separate versions flip flopping in meaning.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_is_thicker_than_water
“premature optimization is the root of all evil”
vs.
“Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.”
I frequently see people use that cropped quote to justify paying no attention whatsoever to performance, which usually bites them in the ass (or would have bit them in the ass, if the standards for software weren't so low these days).
In this day and age where hiring managers filter folks based on alphabet soup lists of tech and hum and haw over not 8 years of one of the dozen things and ... it's not even a thing it's a just file format ... and they can't stop using Java and JavaScript interchangeably damn it!
sigh
It's easy to get frustrated by the demands folks have for ... both.
Public service announcement: If you're into this stuff-check out the Allusionist Podcast: https://www.theallusionist.org/listen
It's full of fun stories like these. One of my favorite language nuggets—the word "guys" is an eponym—most historians trace it back Guy Fawkes.
- Jack of all trades and master of one
- Jack of all trades and master of all
- Master of all trades and jack of none
- Jack of all trades and master of some
Would you trust some random generalist to design the airplane you're going to fly in?
Specialist programmers see no problem on reading values from an unreliable sensor and overriding the pilots decisions if the values are bad.
No, I do not. Because there never was such a thing. What there was/is a rule of thumb to say it takes 10,000 hours to be "expertly proficient" at something - which is not to be confused with being successful.
In other words, putting in 10k hours does not mean you'll play in the Premier League or star in a Hollywood film. It simple means that if you ever hope to do either you'll have to put in at least 10,000 hours.
The media wonders why some of us are so critical of them. Yet they constantly fail to do their job properly. It's a miracle more of us aren't more critical of their monkey see monkey do approach to publishing.
HN linked to a blog post about having a strong bias against books that are made by journalists who aren't experts in the field. I find pop psychology books by journalists with this "anecdote/study/lesson" formula tiring.
Cool, cool... the saying continues, though: “A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one”.
Based on your recent comment, it seems like you were offended or maybe you just don’t understand how these things work at all.
I've only ever heard people correct the phrase to the longer version, so clearly we just live in completely different linguistic worlds. Bubbles are a good thing to bust through, so: thanks.
That must explain it, and you’re welcome.
seems to imply they are correct and you are wrong actually. Or at least the one you use is not the original.
Dabbling is low-risk/low-reward; specialization is high-risk/high-reward.
Generalists actually achieve competency in several fields. Dabblers don't.
A generalist who can program, market, and run a business is likely going to be better at making good decisions over someone with only 1 of those skills.
Forget about Academia for a moment.
Trivially, yes it would be best to be 100% expert in programming, 100% expert in marketing, 100% expert in business, and 100% expert in whatever the business domain is, but that isn't feasible. That's why most new start ups have a founding team, not a founding superperson.
The kind of generalists we are talking about actually have the competency to at least make MVP quality work in a few areas.