Why being a specialist is better than being a generalist for getting a job | Hacker News Reader

Why being a specialist is better than being a generalist for getting a job

hireart.com

36 pointsjra417 comments

Narratives are important.

While it's true that companies often look to hire for a particular skill set and therefore eat up the narrative of a specialist, the skill set of a generalist is a lot more useful in a small startup or if you decide to try to form your own company. (Likewise the skill set of a specialist is often more appropriate for contracts or permanent roles in large companies.)

Either way, the article is right in saying that for a manager trying to hire to fulfill a specific role, the narrative of a specialist will often win. However, I personally despise this idea of "taming your inner generalist" as it is natural and human to be so. There are companies that will filter you out because your experience is too broad and they are at least being helpful in removing themselves from your market. I would not wish to work for a company in which employees of hiring capacity treat people as fungible resources that perform set roles. The companies that are left which look for individual potential, perspiration and personality in whatever form it comes, show, as far as I am concerned, a far deeper understanding of where innovation comes from; criss-crossing domains[0] gives a huge amount of idea optionality.

Additionally, the advantage of being a generalist is in de-risking yourself against the movement of the employment market.

[0] http://www.fastcompany.com/3009649/leadership-now/steve-jobs...

I'm conflicted.. I, personally, would hire the well-rounded "generalist" individual every time. Yet, I know that as a job applicant, most hiring managers don't have much vision when it comes to developing a well-rounded team.

That's why hiring managers should have little say in the final hiring decision. Their job is to attract interested applicants and weed out the clearly unfitting among them (e.g. those who fake their credentials).

The rest of interviewing should be done by actual engineers, peers and colleagues of a prospect employee.

Be warned: many people, especially engineers, are inexperienced and/or poor interviewers. So quality candidates who are savvy enough to look at the interview as a two-way street might very well rule you out as an employer if you're not thoughtful and strategic about who you put in front of them.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

The best engineering teams I've encountered are ones that have an Engineering Manager. The hierarchy is Project/Program Manager -> Engineering Manager -> Engineers. The engineering manager (of technical background) cultivates the engineering team, instills best practices and makes final decisions, without having to sit in endless meetings with the business side (the program manager's job). The engineering manager is usually the hiring manager for more engineers.

It's not a sexy, flat organization, but day-to-day operations are less like herding cats and more about promoting technical excellence.

This advice isn't really universal. It really depends on what type of job you're looking for. If you want to work at a startup, being a specialist ain't going to get you much attention. What's important is that you've had a broad range of experiences and can adapt quickly in any situation.

If you're a founder or early employee at a fast-growing startup, you'll have to make the choice to either remain a generalist (i.e., C-suite), or join the majority of other employees and focus in on something specific. Either way, being a generalist in the beginning of a company's lifecycle can only help you.

> If you want to work at a startup, being a specialist ain't going to get you much attention.

At the same time, few startups I've encountered will hire developers who have never used their technology stack.

I recall, during a conference call with one startup, explaining my background in both Ruby and C# only to have one of the co-founders exclaim "you know we use Node and not Rails here, right?" -- I replied that yes, I do. But I've only ever dabbled in Node and you asked about my experience in web development. That doesn't mean I'm not interested in your product and wouldn't be willing to work on my Javascript... They seemed to lose interest after that.

Generalists work really well at startups or very small companies, but the paradox is that as they grow, generalists have to become specialists or they'll find themselves increasingly irrelevant in the general scheme of things. Its a hard one to realize but its a very important lesson to learn to avoid hard conversations.

But yeah, if you're applying at a bigger company (say 30+ people) focus on a specific skill but don't shy away from calling attention to your versatility as a secondary step in putting your resume together

Yeah, unless they grow into team/project leads (where having a functional and working knowledge of every piece has value).

ditto.. and unless its your company :D

Tech changes so fast that "specialists" in a language or platform can become jobless in a matter of a few years. It's an adapt to survive scheme. In the case of programming languages, the most important thing is to understand the underlying concepts. They always repeat, with different syntax and maybe some incremental innovations, but the basic thinking behind them changes way slower than the languages themselves. As some of you have pointed, I'd always hire a generalist when given the choice.

I like your speech. I mean, I totally agree with you. Unfortunately only a minor portion of job offers asks for generalists. Most companies don't understand the potential of a trait such as curiosity that is found in a generalist personality.

I don't think the article is arguing against being a generalist. It's arguing against selling yourself as a generalist. Being a generalist is fine. But when you're applying to a particular job, emphasize the specific skills that you have which would be applicable to that job.

The advantage of being a generalist, of course, is that you have lots of specific skills that apply to lots of different jobs. You just shouldn't list them all on your resume all the time.

It's good advice:

Build a focused narrative around why you're a great fit for a job you're interested in.

My company is building a product to help you do exactly this: Build a tight, anonymous narrative about why you'd be a great fit for the role you want. Employers browse these profiles and request to interview you if they think you're a fit. The anonymity is important to protect the currently employed.

We're working hard to both automate the creation process for these profiles and remove the burden of answering "What do employers want to see?" for you, the user.

Check us out—https://www.mightyspring.com. We're in private beta, but live track invite requests and will expedite to HN folks.

But you have to be a generalist to be able to grow in a company.

to me this is wrong in my circumstance.

- i live in a smaller city in Australia

as a generalist i can pretty much always get a job (developing, sys admin etc)

i've seen friends specialize in particular technologies and have to move interstate to work in that area or fly in/fly out.

This prioritizes the T candidate over the O candidate through institutional logic (McKinsey). It also ignores the XY Problem tendency in hiring people where they think a certain set of skills is necessary and try to target that, rather than have a conversation about the actual problem and see how the candidate can satisfy it. In this way, it's valorizing the Ninja Rockstar (see also: Big Data, "we're changing the world of X," etc.).

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