bkbaba

I would say that your issue is not to do with generalist vs specialist, its more to do with where you are in your career and how much you contribute. Once you are above a VP level you are no longer a good candidate if your resume lists "proficient in react" as a skill. Its more important to showcase what company level changes are you able to drive. For example your CV should have achievements like - grew the team from size x to y, end to end ownership of a key feature of the product that was able to drive sales by x%, etc.

On these lines generalists "generally" win. I find that when people talk about generealists vs specialists they focus more on number of things they can do. But its more important how you define the skill. You knowing and correctly identifying the data set for marketing team is way more valuable than actually being responsible for querying and putting the data together. Personally I try to spend more time on defining my tasks clearly, so that I can maximise my impact on the organisation. Hopefully this framework is of some help and you can relate to it. All the best friend!

THIS! This is exactly what I hate about being an "Indian" developer living in Bangalore.

It really hurts me that when someone is working with an offshore team they are looking at me as a "cheap resource".

I don't expect the valley crowd to understand this, so let me suggest an experiment. Go to your best developer, and tell her that you are there in the company cause she is "cheap labour", and if it was possible in a fraction of second you would get an engineer from Google and would hire him to do your job! Repeat this constantly for 3 weeks and see if her productivity drops or if she is still around! Its really painful to spend so much time, understand your own workflow and identify shortcomings, being self critical, overcome shortcoming with tips from HN / Stackoverflow, to concentrate on the problem at hand and implement a feature and then have someone come in and call it cheap labor. Previously I was working with a team in US and was reporting to an American. I know he was happy with my performance compared with the rest of my team members in the Valley as a lot of R&D work would be assigned to me. I have worked with angualr, react, rails, java, chrome extensions, ios, android apps. I am definetly not the best in any of this. But based on my previous work I think I am fairly competent.

In enginerring its a huge challenge to bring down cost. SpaceX is celebrated cause they have brought down the cost of launching satellites, when ISRO does it, it hursts me to see the first person who says that they were able to do it cheaper cause of the labor cost in India. I respect my work, and take pride in having built it.

If you want to offshore work don't make them feel like that the only reason you are giving them the work is because they are "cheap".

I know this is not what the article says but I wanted to share this even though this is off topic.

I am not convinced that computers will ACTUALLY REPLACE ALL jobs. Technology could get advanced to do all that humans are accomplishing today, but that doesn't mean that humans will not be doing any jobs any more. There are 2 main problems I see in that

1) Historically technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed. http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/aug/17/technology-c... One BIG difference, technology till now has been designed to aid humans, not replace them. But I think that technology will shift a lot of jobs in another sector but will not bring the sum of human brains needed to run it to 0.

2) Society will not be so nice to organisations taking away ALL its jobs. There will be a huge friction from society when they loose out ALL their jobs at this scale, it could vary from small riots to some new age guerrilla warfare. It will be interesting to see how politicians will react when they loose their jobs to computers though.

Musk: I think the best defense against the misuse of AI is to empower as many people as possible to have AI. If everyone has AI powers, then there’s not any one person or a small set of individuals who can have AI superpower.

???!!!

Isn't this like gun control all over again?! You give more guns to people so that they can be safe, instead you end up killing each other.