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.
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.