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A comment on Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice (2011). Parent comment

Re:Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice... by nscalf on Sunday October 20, 2019 @02:22PM (#21305982)
Because someone is smarter or better at the job in general that the lower quality specialists they can find. It's very hard to find a good generalist. If you can be a good generalist, you're exponentially more valuable than a generic specialist. I have done mostly backend work in Python, but in my current role I've worked in the frontend with Angular, I've debugged critical issues on our iOS app, I've fixed our AWS infrastructure, I've moved us away from dragging files into windows boxes to CI/CD, I've helped architect solutions, I've worked with our customers, I've led efforts across multiple teams, etc.

Being a "Python Programmer" in no way measures my value to the company, in fact, it necessarily limits what I'm actually capable of contributing to the company. If you can show that you can add value outside of a specific tech stack, you're worth the few weeks to learn a new technology. And yeah, it is basically a few weeks to get up to speed and be a contributing member of a code base if you don't know the technology. 6-12 months to know all of the details if you're a solid engineer.

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Re:Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice... by scarface74 on Sunday October 20, 2019 @02:54PM (#21306226)
I would say just the opposite. When it comes to the entire “web developer” tech stack, sure I can put together a website good enough for internal use, but I’m not very good at the front end.

I consider myself to be very good at C#, okay at backend JS development and passable at Python.

I have enough experience from doing a lot of ETL in a previous life to know how to automize queries and schemas for speed and to not lock up a database.

I’ve set up CI/CD solutions from scratch with what is now called “Azure Devops”, AWS’s CodeBuild/CodeDeploy/CodePipeline, OctopusDeploy and Jenkins

I could just as easily and competitively apply for jobs as an “AWS Architect” who knows most of the popular AWS offerings for developers, Devops, netops, and system administrators and I have experience with them.

But in many of those areas - especially on the front end and with the netops, system administration stuff, at any scale. It wouldn’t make any sense to hire someone who “kind of” knows what they are doing over hiring a specialist.

If I need something now I’m not going to want to wait for you to get up to speed in year.

Do you really think you’re as good at any of those areas as a specialist? AWS alone announces dozens of new things every month on their podcast.

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Re:Don't Call Yourself a Programmer, and Other Career Advice... by nscalf on Monday October 21, 2019 @07:55PM (#21318911)
I think we might be talking in different time scales, and maybe different responsibilities. If you're looking to bring on someone to solve an urgent problem this month, you're going to need a specialist in the area. If you're bringing on an early hire to build a team, or another engineer to bolster your team with some specialists, you may want a solid generalist. There might also be some significant difference between organizational structures, if you're joining a team centered around building and supporting a product, or maybe a startup with only one or two products, a generalist might be much more effective. If you're joining a massive organization where there are highly specialized teams dealing with specific problem areas, a specialist makes a lot more sense.

As a sweeping statement, I'm better at solving "a problem" than a specialist. If you define the problem area tightly, they may be the right person for the job, but if the role you're hiring for has uncertainty and flexibility, the front end specialist probably isn't the right person to figure out why your database is slow, your load balancer isn't working, your build and deploy process is stuck, etc.

There are definitely roles that are much more fit to one or the other, but the generalist can handle a lot of things pretty well. All of that being said, we can probably agree that the best setting is having both.

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