Re:Ask HN: Is the Generalist Dead?
by downerending on Tuesday June 09, 2020 @03:18PM
(#23469820)
I've noticed this more and more over the years, both in job hunts and in watching colleagues work. For the former, having a broad collection of technologies on my resume often seems to draw the reaction of "So, you don't really know anything well?".
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.
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.