Re:Senior Developers Are Getting Rejected for Jobs
by averros on Thursday May 16, 2019 @05:48AM
(#19927537)
As somebody who wrote all of the above (and a lot more) I call B.S. on this one.
The amount of unique stuff in each subfield is not that great, and if you have a wide and solid base in different subfields, picking up the unique ideas and techniques isn't that hard or time consuming.
But after a generalist has it, he is a lot more productive and creative because he often applies stuff from other subfields to come up with better/novel solution to the problem at hand - something a specialist cannot do.
But he wasn't ignorant of them. He knew the existing work. He was extremely well read in physics and maths. He wasn't a generalist!
If you get a group of random generalists to build your compiler, or your graphics engine, or your cryptography stack, they aren't going to know what they don't know, and it'd take them decades to come up to speed.