Ask HN: Is the Generalist Dead?
I spent the last 2 years building a SaaS startup that the pandemic killed. I've been founder or the first non-founder engineer for most of my 13 year career.
I am now in the uncomfortable position of looking for a job and it's not going the way it has in the past. I'm very good at talking to nontechnical stakeholders, gathering requirements, implementing them on the frontend and backend, building the infrastructure, and deploying the code. In short: I can own the entire process from start to finish.
Nobody seems to want this anymore. They want people who have spent X years working exclusively with Y framework that they can slot in to do only that. When I tell people what I've been doing they act like I'm crazy, that nobody can own the entire process from start to finish. They then ask me to do code golf or answer obscure programming trivia that only a specialist would know.
So here's my question: does anybody hire generalists anymore? Or did I torch my career by taking the entrepreneurship route and not specializing?
For the latter, it will often happen that an X programmer (for whatever X) knows their language quite well, but is utterly adrift if something happens that's outside of the language's abstraction. Often I'll debug something in a few minutes with 'strace', and they react like I just raised the dead.
If you're job hunting, you could do some A/B testing by generating a highly targeted resume for some specific tech that you know well, in addition to your "true" resume. Send the variants to different places and see what happens.
In my experience you have to tailor your resume to the job. Play up you experiences with what they are looking for. Once you get into the interview stages, let them know you also know a bunch of other technologies too.
What kind of experience do you have?
Typically they're hiring because they have some specific pain that the founder/CTO/person who wrote all the code lacks expertise in.
I have over a decade of experience of fielding phone calls from the CEO requesting a new feature by Monday, then delivering it to win a deal. I'm also good at getting on the phone with customers to find out what they need, then delivering that.
Finding a startup at the right stage seems to be pretty tough these days. There don't seem to be a lot of companies that are early enough to use my skills but are able to pay me actual money instead of equity.
This is the way any field goes when the technology advances. In the 1960s most people working on computers then were effectively electronic engineers, computer scientists and software developers all at the same time. Now in 2020, you will be hard pressed to find a software company that cares about your knowledge of ohm's law and similarly you won't find an embedded electronics company that cares about your experience with state management in React.