I hire at a FAANG for two roles where we specifically target generalists: Solutions Architect (design solutions for complex real-world problems) and Technical Solutions Engineer (last line of support for really gnarly cases). Both need people who can cover a lot of ground, and it's hard to be good at either if you don't have significant practical experience and can't traverse the stack from source code to tcpdumps if needed. That said, being just a generalist is not going to cut the mustard, you're going to need depth in at least one field, plus you need to be able to talk to customers too.

Mandatory plug: if you think you'd fit the bill and are keen to explore, find me through my HN profile. Bonus points for being anywhere in APAC, although I can refer you elsewhere too.

Do you (or anyone else) know of any more resources of what a Solutions Architect is doing day to day at that company? What artifacts are they producing, how much hands on are they, do they belong to teams etc?

I have the title right now but it is a new one in the company and it is up to me to navigate really what it means for us.

EDIT: And are there any books or other resources you or you see Solution Architects recommend?

Do you happen to hire co-ops for these type of roles? I have recently had interest in consulting

> Generalists are generally (hrhr) ignored by HR though. They don't fit any mold so have a harder time getting hired. The most successful ones I know usually freelance.

I think as you gain experience you naturally become more of a generalist over time.

I've been a freelance developer for 20ish years and I would consider myself a generalist at this point, but it took many many years to get to this point.

Everything from learning the Linux basics, how networking works, various programming languages and web frameworks, database modeling, dealing with the ops side of things, and the list goes on and on. Basically I spent a majority of my life learning all of these things in a lot of detail, but most of it ended up being on a need to know basis.

Basically once you become somewhat proficient in something, you naturally start learning about some other related topic. Even today I still think I know almost nothing in the grand scheme of things.

As a specialist who is currently looking for a job, HR generally only seeks generalists. Almost all interview loops that have been standardized seriously prefer generalists. The mold doesn’t fit anyone and are just generic programming/system design questions that do not evaluate specialist skills and experience at all.

PL specialists are also pretty good generalists. I mean, what hasn’t Jeff Dean done and do people even remember that he has a PL PhD anymore?

   PL specialists are also pretty 
   good generalists.

It has also been my experience that people with a PL / compiler background are often great generalists. At Google I can think of at least the following:

Jeff Dean, Fergus Henderson, Ken Thompson, Rob Pike, Ben Gomes, David Stoutamire, David Bailey, Urs Hoelzle, Hal Abelson, Martin Abadi, Peter Norvig, Sanjay Ghemawat.

There are more but can't think of them off the top of my head. Chris Lattner is a non-Google example.

(As an aside, I see a similar phenomenon -- albeit at a much lower level of ability -- in my undergratuate students, and I've supervised a large number: top students almost always do well in / and have enjoyed their compilers course.) Why would that be the case? I can offer 3 hypotheses for discussion.

1. PL / compiler stuff is so trivial that everybody can be good at it.

2. PL / compiler stuff is so difficult that only the smartest can be good at it.

3. PL / compiler stuff forces you to think deeply about the most important tools in programming, namely the CPU and programming languages, and the bridge between them (the compiler).

I'm inclined to go for (3).

People are often into PL because they are into programming and want to improve the tools and languages used for programming. For us, programming isn’t just a means to an end, it’s an end also.

Or 4.: Most problems are about transforming A to B like in a compiler. Many of the techniques in compilers are also applicable elsewhere.

I think experience in compiler and language design is a strong signal of meta-thinking about problems and high-level abstraction. Compiler implementation requires a kind of rigorous thinking and separation of concerns to keep straight, because you're writing code that writes code, and need to model execution explicitly. Also, all edge cases and interacting features need to be considered in both disciplines - you generally can't get away with smoke and mirror demos or handwaving.

I don't think it adds up to generalist though. Generalists need knowledge in a lot of different things (though one man's generalist is another man's "full stack" web app developer), or else they're just smart people who don't know much yet.

None of the standardized interview looks test for that kind of knowledge however, they really are generic. Also, I’ve find that the really famous bigcorps don’t care as much about what you know than what you could learn, even for experienced hires. So by generalist, they simply mean someone who can learn to do anything rather than someone who can already do anything. Full stack job descriptions often come from lower tiered tech companies that can’t afford that and anyways don’t have as much specialized infrastructure as a place like google does anyways.

Very insightful: 'They are smart people who don't know much yet.' One thing to consider is that understanding only how a compiler organizes things or how a good assembly programmer understands the world is not conducive to anything but optimization. The true generalist, while able to perform binary analysis and understand executable file organization, is not tied to that. They are pattern people. Learn the pattern, see the relation.

I think whether or not you're a capable generalist is independent of whether or not you have a PL PhD. Jeff Dean is a generalist because he invested significant time in working across a wide variety of problems, not because of his PhD. If anything, a PhD makes you a specialist by default. You need to do extra work to gain diverse experience across the stack.

This is to say that I don't think you should use Jeff Dean as an argument for hiring PL specialists in generalist roles.

Google does this though. Whenever is PL PhDs get together, someone invariably talks about how they are doing ads for google these days. It’s actually so common that it has become a meme.

I don't know if I'd call that talented though? I mean, I also got the right number in the IQ and motivation lottery, but not only is that like 80% biochemistry, it's not a differentiator in the sense of doing qualitatively different things. I do all the same things as everybody else, just faster and without guidance.

But I work with people who are extreme specialists. (I don't mean in React. I mean in computer vision or non linear optimization, that kind of thing.) There is an entire class of problems that only those people can address properly; I could learn to but it would take me a couple years and the output from these years would be significantly below state of the art. In general they're skilled, not just talented, but they also work with mental models that require some amount of essential ability to grasp and that plenty of people will never be able to fully understand.

Although, the most successful developers I know (of) are both generalists and extremely talented. Their special talent is "people understanding"!

When I stopped programming I moved more into technical testing and that morphed into 'project guru' on some quite large projects. I could understand from low level network protocols up to the big fluffy clouds, I could also pick things up very quickly as I understood all the building blocks if not the latest buzz words. From my first exposure to SQL I was optimising databases better than the incumbent dba within a couple of months, and that wasn't even my job.

I loved the work, but the downside was no one ever advertised for that role despite it was very important to the project.

> From my first exposure to SQL I was optimising databases better than the incumbent dba within a couple of months, and that wasn't even my job.

That doesn't mean much, as in the not so distant past (and in some small shops even today) the resident database expert is far from experienced or even technically apt. In fact, it was and still is a job that was assigned internally to someone who happened to have anything to do with the project, who was thus forced to accumulate yet another responsibility.