>> Someone who becomes competent in at least three diverse domains and integrates them into a top 1-percent skill set.
If you take this advice and tone it down a lot, it becomes both reasonable and good.
From Scott Adam's Career Advice [0]:
> But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:
> 1. Become the best at one specific thing.
> 2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.
> The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try.
> The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.
___
0. https://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/car...
Employers want specialists, and pay for them. If your CV is two or three distinct things (I don't mean a selection of languages, or front and back end dev here, I mean distinct skills like say programming and accountancy) it's very unlikely to get you a better salary.
In fact if you've diverged from a straight specialism throughout your career it's probable you'll be punished with a lower salary, and problems getting hired in the first place. Expect a lot of challenging interview questions as to why you haven't followed a straight line from junior, through senior into project management (which of course is a different skill, making this even more inconsistent).
I'm sure those same disparate skills could be hugely useful if you're starting a business or startup, but for employment it's likely to make life harder, even though many employers would benefit just as much from your increased breadth of perspective.
So outside a few rare employers, and a few lucky applicants, I don't think there's much out there for generalists, sadly.
I don't think this is true. Getting better at a thing has diminishing - often severely diminishing returns. Giving up being top 23% in programming in exchange for being top 25% in programming + top 25% in accounting doesn't seem like it would be much of a career liability.
> Employers want specialists, and pay for them. If your CV is two or three distinct things (I don't mean a selection of languages, or front and back end dev here, I mean distinct skills like say programming and accountancy) it's very unlikely to get you a better salary.
You're probably not going to get a better salary working for a company that only values one skill. You have to pick your employer more carefully. That being said, there are tons of software jobs in the banking/accounting sector ranging from product development to consulting. I'm sure that being an excellent programmer and an excellent accountant could make you much more money than just one without the other at some of those companies.
Another question: as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18484883 says, would it help to rewrite your CV to highlight what the job is looking for? Again, if it's an engineering job, talk about your eng accomplishments in great detail, with perhaps only a bullet point for other skills at the bottom of the resume?
As https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ says:
> Did the solicitation for the job say “We are seeking someone with strong skills at scaling traffic in a fast-moving environment”? Pick out the key words. Scaling traffic. Fast-moving environment. “Scaling traffic” doesn’t sound like how I’d phrase it if I were writing or speaking for myself, but if you’ve just described your need to me as scaling traffic, by golly I will tell you how great I am at scaling traffic.
This really depends on your employer and your definition of specialist. There are jobs where following a very straight career path would be a disadvantage: you might be perceived as a boring candidate who would potentially struggle if given work outside their domain. I think it's fair to say that, generally, breadth is valued more at smaller companies where people have to multi-task.
In academia it's much easier to do well as an inter-disciplinary researcher than it is to try and be the best in a single field. The obvious killer combo right now is machine learning for X, where X is a field which does not have a strong grounding in computer science. Hacker news gives a very skewed view on the world, as if everyone is up to date with the latest developments in deep learning. In reality, most people in academia are pretty unaware of what's possible, or don't have the technical skills (or grad students with them) to make use of it. This is currently true even for maths-heavy fields like physics, which you may find surprising - I certainly do. Now is a really good time to get on the ladder.
You also need to consider job satisfaction. People who are pretty good at several things may be bored with a single track career, and no amount of money will make up for that.
IME, not at all during the hiring process. And only rarely later.
Your comment below gives one side, where companies want a specific thing and don't want to think beyond that. There is another side to that, where the company can't afford a dedicated engineer for X, and so being able to do some of that work is very valuable. I think this is probably more common in hardware startups more than anywhere else.
I've worked at companies (< 10 people) where we absolutely wanted different (relevant) skills, because we needed people to be reasonably autonomous in carrying out tasks. For example, we wanted people who had optical lab experience, could program and if you had mechanical engineering that was a big bonus.
My suggestion was that the odds of needing multiple skills is larger at a 5 person early stage startup than an established 200 person company. The larger you go, the more you're at the whim of HR screening. There may well have a long list of requirements, but on the job you're probably going to be more specialised.
IMHO, this is mostly due to the nature of the industry I am in (software). Hiring engineers is difficult, and only done when there are specific needs to fill - particularly at small companies, that can't afford to think too far ahead, or afield.
Agreed, although I can also detect a lot of negativity from an older generation of academics in fields that classically border machine learning very closely. One remark I found funny (paraphrasing) is: "Total learning is a constant, and it consists of the sum of the machine's and the person's learning.. the deeper the learning of the machine.. the shallower the learning of the person". But I don't really have a stake in this and am not in much of a position to judge.
- philosopher (Bachelor's degree)
- sociologist (Master's degree with thesis on criminology)
- international relations student (another bachelor's dg in 2 years)
- C# Programmer (by a workshop)
- Java Programmer (by profession)
- Python programmer / Data scientist (by self education)
- Data Analyst with SQL(workshop & profession)
and the HR guys around here just think "I am not focused enough" and don't even get into the technical phase of the interview most of the time. Sadly, I think, if I could get into that part I'd ace it. Right now I am super demotivated though.
Maybe this is a regional thing, I can not comment about how my resumé would look to an international company but the question of "what does it mean to be an employable person" is a valid one and sadly can be answered with hyperspecialization and/or knowing the right people working in the company.
Most places want cogs. If you're too broad or have too many teeth, you're not going to fit in with the other cogs.
But you may be pitching at the wrong level. Developer jobs may not be the right niche for someone with a broad spectrum of skills. (By which I mean genuinely broad multidisciplinary professional skills and interests, not [three popular coding languages with some backend experience].)
Management and strategy may be a better fit.
https://www.spotifyjobs.com/job/senior-ad-tech-engineer-back...
In addition to the standard Backend swe callouts the job desires ad-tech knowledge and advertising business knowledge. I'd be willing to bet they have a strong inclination towards anyone who's in the top 25% of both, but would consider cross-training for a top 1% in either.
As you go up the IC ladder the demand for cross-functional skills rises.
Are you also good in your primary skill? Is it like 100% of engineering (say) + 20% of UX design, or 60% each of engineering and UX design? In the former case, one will clear the bar for an engineer job post, with your UX design skills helping to position you above other qualified engineers. In the latter case, you may be judged unqualified and rejected.
And what do you think about related skills, like UX design or marketing in addition to programming.
I'm a generalist, but for each application I have to mold it in to a fitting expertise. Even when applying for product and project management.
even within companies, no matter what you actually do, your job title will haunt you. doing 90% frontend dev and being the designer, doing 60% product and being the project manager.
that it doesn't pay now is only because not enough people are aware of the benefits.
it's similar to the problem of hiring for a specific tools as opposed to hiring people who are good at learning new tools. if the new tools are similar to the ones they already know they will be productive in no time.
greetings, eMBee.
After you learn how to program, you will need to learn what to program and that requires more diverse skills and knowledge to make those decisions.
Things like "what's best practice" when I've just exhaustively explained how we're in the precise corner case to which the normal best practice doesn't apply are, for me, the hallmark of PM ideas. Deep technical insight or domain knowledge are not.
Edit to add: Great drawing skill does not matter for most comic strips. Look at Peanuts, or Garfield, or more recently Pearls Before Swine or XKCD. Ryan North has been posting Dinosaur Comics 3 times a week for 15 years using the same art for every single one.
XKCD looks simple, but the recognizability of these simple characters isn't that easy to achieve.
I am in my mid 60s so I have had the benefit of working with many people who were individually very skilled in more that one field, and these people were the highest producers not just for the direct work they did but also for influencing other developers. These 7 or 8 people have had the greatest influence on my career.
It may also take your focus away from becoming good enough in your primary skill to pass the hiring bar. If you can do engineering, marketing and UX design, but you're not good enough in any of these fields to get hired as an engineer, marketer or designer, you're in trouble.
I think it's better to pick a primary field, get to the top 10% in that field, while being good enough at a secondary skill. For example, "I'm a great engineer, but I can also get you your first 10,000 users on the marketing side. I won't be as good as a dedicated marketing person, of course, but I can get this job done." Then you can apply for an engineer job, convince them how good an engineer you're, and then convince them that you also have some design and marketing skills.
(10% was an arbitrary number. The point is that your skills in your primary field should be good enough to clear the bar.)
> No, it's because the thing you're talking about is a "genius" not a "generalist."
I think you may be misunderstanding that definition. It's not saying that you have to be the top 1% of practitioners of those domains. It's saying that by gaining general competence in at least three disparate domains and identifying ways to integrate those into each other, you inherently create a top 1% skillset for that amalgamation of skills. You might only have an average level of competence in each one individually, but drop into a situation that involves more than one of your competencies, and you've suddenly become far more valuable in that environment than more competent specialists that don't have the cross-domain knowledge that you do.
I have the type of "deep generalist" skillset that the article references. I'm competent enough to get by in about a half dozen competencies and a career that has hopped between technical, business, and consultancy roles in a variety of functional disciplines and industries. If I tried to pivot to a role focused on any one of those skillsets, I'd be hard-pressed to pass an interview for a role at the appropriate seniority level to be commensurate with my current salary.
But in the right environment and right organizational structure, I'm incredibly effective. I currently work for a consulting agency, and in the past year I've mainly worked on four different accounts. For two of those accounts, their needs were such that I was able to leverage a combination of my skillsets for them. The results were uniquely impactful enough that the client teams for both know me by name and both have tried to poach me from my agency, along with one vendor I worked with (on a client's behalf). For the other two accounts, I was brought in to fill a singular need that happened to be one of my competencies. While I filled that need adequately, the results weren't noteworthy enough to warrant me even having any direct contact with the clients beyond being one of the disembodied voices that pipe up sometimes on a conference call.
Still, generalist-like integrators are needed, but not at the cost of specialists.
Richard Feynman was obviously brilliant, based on any measure of real life impact you can imagine. Meanwhile, an IQ test is just something we made up.
The only reasonable approach to this set of data is to conclude that IQ is not as good as we wish at actually measuring intelligence.
The pattern recognition skills that most IQ tests ask are fairly similar to solving a lot of exam questions. But they're only a part of the skillset that you need to become a great physicist.
If Feynman had prepared for an IQ test I bet he could have made it to 160. The kinds of patterns you see on IQ tests can be trained. But it's not a particularly interesting pursuit. I've personally done a professional IQ test and reached 130 while in university. Because in school you're training similar kind of problems regularly. I'm sure if I did an IQ test now I wouldn't even get close to 130, because I don't do exam questions regularly anymore. I also can't quote any successes similar to Mr. Feynman, so I doubt this is meaningful.
What IQ doesn't measure is curiosity. It doesn't measure how well you connect disparate disciplines. It doesn't measure how ready you are to upset the status quo. And if I read Feynman's book "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" correctly (great read btw), it was these things that actually made him think about physics problems from a different perspective.
I don't have the exact citation but it is fairly well documented that he scored well on other very challenging tests that correlate strongly with IQ (not to mention his actual career accomplishments).
Needless to say, people bandying around his score on this one test as evidence that he was 'bright but not in a high IQ' way is disingenuous or ill-informed, to say the least.
I could be wrong but I believe the common consensus is that his 120ish score on that test was not representative of his actual IQ, and was maybe the result of some other circumstance.
I'm not an expert on psychometrics, I think all I'm trying to point out is that Feynman performed highly on other tests that likely correlate highly with IQ, so I believe it more likely that there is some confounding factor at play other than this being representative of his actual IQ.
Or maybe that his IQ averaging here doesn't tell us much about which domains he scored highest in (some posit that he may have scored very poorly in a verbal section vs. mathematical etc.).
Sorry for the snark but do you honestly not see that there is a difference between the two cases?
[1] An unreliable/uncertain one, even.
I think the argument of "so and so was a genius so don't bother you can't do what they did" is a really defeatist attitude.
And I would say that this is probably a good idea because it seems like most valuable knowledge (and with the most benefit) is increasingly found between disciplines rather than in any single given discipline. There is huge potential in bioinformatics, applying quantitative methods to urban planning, technology assisted design and so forth, all of which requires combination of very different sets of traits.
Aristotle almost certainly never worked a day in his life. He likely benefited from patroi-cliens arrangements. His job was to think, to learn, to observe the world around him. We don't really have anything like what he and his contemporaries had today, the closest we have is career academics.
Leonardo (his name is NOT Leonardo da Vinci, that would be like calling me Ryan Speedway) was again someone who mostly lived off of patrons/benefactors after his youth, which we know virtually nothing of, and had a lot of free time. He went into an apprenticeship at 14 and by 28 he was working for, arguably, the richest family in the world as an artist. Again, he simply had a lot of free time to contemplate the world around him and tinker.
Benjamin Franklin read. A lot. Like really a LOT. By 21 he was hardcore networking by creating Junto and later as a Mason. Combine his reading with his mechanical knowledge by working with printing presses and being generally successful financially again gave him a lot of free time for the era, time to spend contemplating existence, observing the world around him, talking to experts in other fields, sitting around Lodge discussing various topics.
I wouldn't say they were geniuses, I would say they were fortunate. They mad means of support and had free time. They had the freedom to pursue things that interested them and support systems in place to allow them to worry little about surviving and focus more on tinkering.
Leisure time is a necessity, but it’s not the difference maker.
But did they have wealthy benefactors underwriting their life?
Aristotle thought for a living. He almost certainly never had to worry about money, ever.
Leonardo had to churn out works of art occasionally to keep money coming in. In the case of Leonardo he could pursue an odd project and in some cases get someone wealthy to finance it and as a student of art he studied human form, studied the mechanical nature of living creatures. He naturally applied that artist's eye to form and function to doodling inventions, some of which he made and some of which stayed on paper. I wouldn't be surprised if there have been hundreds of thousands of people that have doodled such machines and contraptions and simply not had the wealthiest family in the world to pay them to make some of them as novelties for court.
Franklin learned about printing, ran away, hustled and started his own printing operation becoming quite a name in the printing industry then used that success to throw money at many other industries. When he died his estate was worth tens of millions of inflation-adjusted dollars. It's a hell of a lot easier to be successful at a myriad of things when you actually have the funds to tinker.
Look at Silicon Valley, you see founders with multiple successful exits. It's a lot easier to get funding after you've already had a success, it's a lot easier to get press after you've already had success, it's a lot easier to get customers and attract good talent when you've already had success.
Neither has every wealthy housewife, ever.
Nor every senator’s son, etc.
If that was the determining factor, every young adult rolling around in old money should be pumping out sistine chapels and eradicating polio. It’s necessary, but it’s not the thing that makes the difference.
I would disagree. A polymath is an expert / master of multiple fields (let’s say 3 or more). A genius does not necessarily excel in multiple fields, but he will certainly produce novel, groundbreaking contributions to a specific field. A genius tends to be a specialist — at least where his major contributions and legacy lies.
A generalist is not necessarily an expert or master of any field. He could just know enough in each field to be competent. So I think we’re talking about 3 different people: geniuses, generalists, and polymaths.
Anyone with a liberal arts degree can operate as a generalist. Leonardo Da Vinci and Ben Franklin were polymaths. Einstein and Feynman had genius.
As for polymath, he certainly wasn't that. I've done physics, biology, statistics, software engineering, violinist, composer, dance historian, learned a bunch of languages, and written a novel. I'm a pretty pedestrian level polymath, and Crick was nowhere near me.
> Someone who becomes competent in at least three diverse domains and integrates them into a top 1-percent skill set.
Then proceeds with:
> Despite the world’s immense need for polymaths, these individuals seem to be quite rare. That’s because society promotes specialization over generalization
No, it's because the thing you're talking about is a "genius" not a "generalist."
I agree that the world would benefit from more legendary geniuses like Aristotle, Leonardo Da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Francis Crick, or Richard Feynman! I do not agree that this opinion is novel, insightful, useful, or worth an essay.