Back in the days of 20th century ambitious, well-funded journalism, it was common to see specialized writers do their boldest, most imaginative work in their first year on the beat.
They also made some newbie mistakes, but on their good days, they saw stuff that the old pros didn't. They asked the "obvious" questions that everyone else had stopped asking. They ventured into areas that according to conventional wisdom were "unimportant" or "not yet significant."
People who had been on the same beat for 10 years or more could reliably generate solid and perhaps even admired work in their specialties. But they worked within shrinking boundaries.
The senior editors who really earned their keep made sure that the rest of us kept rotating into new fields every few years, so that the "wow!" factor never left our work.
I've seen so many examples,where people,who spent decades in their fields become so cynical and 'know it all' type. This is almost universal across all fields.Fresh minds are always a good idea.
It depends on your field. Engineering is a good counterexample.
I have seen the reverse where so many junior engineers make soooooo many mistakes that are absolutely obvious to experienced engineers. That's why we review things.
I would also argue that programming advances so slowly for exactly this reason--we really don't respect the senior ones who know what they are doing.
In spite of what people think, programming isn't "new" anymore. A "know it all" programmer may be someone who has seen the wheel turn 3 or 4 times at this point. I would argue that programming hasn't really had a significant change since modern (read: assumes infinite memory and CPU) managed runtimes (Java, Python and Javascript).
Part of this is that the fastest way to a VC lottery winner is "social fad"--you want youngsters primarily because they are "plugged into the scene" and the programming is secondary. The number of times I have seen junior programmers try to solve the halting problem would make you weep.
I don't disagree with this, but I do feel like there is some benefit to movement within different niches of engineering. I've been on teams where someone who, while being an experienced engineer, was new to the stack or hadn't worked on a project like ours, and they brought new ideas/technologies to the table simply because they were so excited to look for them—i.e. the "Wow!" factor of stepping into a new space. To agree with you, however, I've only ever seen this among engineers who had a strong general base. I've personally been the junior who tried to solve the halting problem :)
> The number of times I have seen junior programmers try to solve the halting problem would make you weep.
In what context?
What you describe is an example professors used during my education to motivate theoretical CS studies, i.e. you don't want to be THAT guy.
However, while this is true, I haven't yet seen many junior programmers on the job trying to solve the halting problem. I don't quite understand why that would be common. But maybe you are talking more about online communities and side projects?
> > The number of times I have seen junior programmers try to solve the halting problem would make you weep.
> In what context?
The problem is that they don't recognize it as the "Halting Problem". It will be something like "Well, we can scan this thing to see if it does X or Y." No, actually you can't because "Doesn't terminate" is also an option. Oops. That's the Halting Problem.
In digital design, non-causal logic is a similar pitfall. Offline DSP algorithms can look backward and forward in time. If, however, you try to apply such a forward looking algorithm to a real-time system that needs an answer on the same time as the current sample, you wind up accidentally creating non-causal logic and wondering why your algorithm isn't working.
The example problem is unclear. Could you please describe more on it. Which DSP algorithm falls under the Halting Problem and is there any database or general programming related problem that falls under "Halting Problem" ?
Suppose your company is developing a framework for creating mobile apps. You work on optimizing the GUI renderer and you are assigned a task to make a module which finds computationally equivalent render functions (or a company making a programming assignment plagiarism system, or a duplicate config file detector when the config language is accidentally Turing-Complete).
You may try removing whitespace, finding invariants, ordering the variables by type, converting for loops to while, tail call optimization, but your collegue always has a trick to make equivalent functions undetectable by your module. You were solving the halting problem. Instead, you should use CS knowledge and tell them it's impossible but they can have a non-optimal search. Perhaps, the fastest way to complete the task would be to score similarities between the functions' machine code or AST.
To me the real tension seems to be between individual interests and societal pressure. I suspect most people, if left completely free, would end up undertaking quite a wide range of endeavors and might not even end up specializing at all. There is however great societal pressure to find a niche (ideally as narrow as possible) and occupy it exclusively. That's what's "best for the economy", however stifling for individual human development.
This is not to say that there aren't people out there more than happy to have a deep specialization. That's perfectly fine as long as it's done as a free individual choice and not as some parental/scholastic imposition.
I've observed more of the opposite pressure - people without commercial pressures want to focus on their particular interests, but instead are constantly pressured to generalize and monetize.
As a software developer I would love to focus on understanding technology thoroughly. Actually, just a small subset of "technology", because there are so many tools that will be gone in five years anyway. I would rather focus on the, uhm, less ephemeral aspects of technology.
However, the pressure at workplace is exactly in the opposite direction. First, one should become a "full stack developer", because why hire two or three experts when we can have one person do everything. Then one needs to become a "dev ops", so that we don't have to hire a system administrator either. Afterwards, one is pushed to also do some management, customer support, etc.
I suppose the ultimate dream is a company consisting of only two kinds of people: the boss, and the infinitely replaceable all-knowing employees. Generalists are popular, because you can always fire one and distribute his former workload among the remaining ones.
This is something that has been attractive about the blockchain space. The more generalized you become the more you get paid.
Offer trusted escrow because multisig is too complicated? Win.
Compiled a slightly better mining software? Win.
Learned how to host and run an exchange? Win.
Learned how to launch an irrelevant, redudant new blockchain? Win.
and the list goes on and on and on
Absolutely nobody is going to say "hmmmm, it looks like you've been doing trusted escrow for years, we need someone that knows React JS and can hit the ground running"
(Only traders and holders lose money in the blockchain space bear markets. A lot of people earn, and earn quite a substantial amount regardless of exchange rates.)
As a former IT industry analyst who tended towards being a generalist--and has a somewhat similar role today--there's a tension that I've often discussed with people.
On the one hand, my personal preferences just tend to being more generalist. And I think that can inform opinions and understanding whereas extreme specialists can often have such blinders that they really miss broader context.
On the other hand, go too broad and you know a little bit about a lot of different things. And you really have very little background in any individual area to, for example, push back against BS claims.
On the other hand, a generalist is in the best position to understand where it is most beneficial to go deep. Even just the exercise of thinking through your domain, and trying to identify where you should best allocate your resources is useful.
I'm in a profession now where full 100% of the founders of successful start-ups in this domain started off in a different industry. It's kind of astonishing that none of the experts in the field have been able to leverage their knowledge to start a successful company, they just act as consultants.
I don't really disagree. Tech types tend to dismiss outsiders who don't have specialized knowledge in a particular area.
That said, in many contexts, no one can have a useful perspective on everything. Yes, a Lou Gerstner can come into IBM and be successful. But, if we're talking beyond high level management, you probably need some domain-specific expertise.
Mixed feelings on this one.On one side, if you want to become really good at something,I think those 10k hours are quite accurate.The problem is, our society runs on the basis that there's 0.1-1% of people that are extremely good at something and the rest are just average. I'm 34 and I did some crazy variety of jobs: construction, plumbing, advertising, translation, project management, operations management, development.Did I become really good at any of it? No,but I was good enough to be able to do those jobs. I'm getting better at programming, however it'd take another 5 years or so before I could say I'm really great at it. Such a variety of jobs and industries gave me a very interesting perspective to business which I would have never had if I only had one job,no matter which one.
I’m in a very similar boat. I’ve served in the military, been a tiler, been a developer, worked in customer service, been in finance for a large bank been a student many times over. There have been many times though where a general practice/skill/thought process from one industry has solved a problem in another.
I’m a similar age to you and at one point I had considered myself a “jack of all trades, master of none” and that really bugged me. But now I’m glad for it. I find my thinking doesn’t get too tunnel visioned because of it. It also took a while to shake the stigma of not “specializing” enough.
I ran across a quite a while back though that really struck a cord with me:
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
I quite like that phrase tbh! The thing is that I've met some people in my life who only did office jobs and they know nothing if it's not on a computer. People don't know how to put a nail in a wall or how to assemble a simple IKEA shelve. They get so surprised when you tell them some basic stuff that you'd think anyone should know at their age. Sometimes it gets so bad that you can't find words to describe it.
> In hostile learning environments without repetitive patterns, mastery is much harder to achieve. The feedback loop is insidious. Unlike chess, experience does not necessarily make you better. You may stick with the wrong approach because you’re convinced it’s the right one.
If you find the idea of "friendly learning environment" vs "hostile learning environment" interesting, consider reading Leslie Valiant's book "Probably Approximately Correct" -- a discussion of what is learnable in the natural world
Does everyone do this, or is it a particularly American conceit to look for simple solutions to complex problems?
'Recipe' is a misleading metaphor that invites trouble. Preparation and perseverance are great ingredients.
You can't make an instruction book for success. Heck, we have all succeeded in spite of ourselves at some point, so there isn't even a sure-fire instruction set for failure either.
You do things to improve your odds, or mitigate possible disasters, and you hope. But if you didn't even try, then what are you complaining about?
My impression is that specialist is just used as a label for imperative knowledge (process knowledge of how to do something), and generalist a label for process selection and management, declarative knowledge essentially.
What's ignored are cascades of knowledge, where specializing in the right thing can make you an expert in an adjacent task with very little effort, where the barrier might be just different labels or terminology. So you can become both a potential specialist and generalist by chosing the right thing to specialize in.
The best leaders have to be experts at everything. It requires a specialization in generalization, to understand not just your own role but every role in an organization.
I think people are just very varied. Take a graph of happiness/success over time for a bunch of people and anecdotally it can take almost any shape. I know a bunch of people who had the same specialisation as children (music) and their lives have varied massively.
In statistics / machine learning this is very common because in corporations, anything that can be used to control decision making or attribute credit tends to get locked down with politics.
Even when machine learning solutions have unambiguous value propositions and direct paths to cost-effective implementations based on known techniques and resource requirements, the projects are subject to extreme risk of internal political shutdowns, arbitrary gatekeeper constraints on data limitations or limitations of what technique can be used so that specialists in technique X can build up longterm control of a profit stream (I’ve seen this a lot in investment firms) and eat up all the promotion opportunities by convincing leadership that their version of a research platform is the only allowable one, and more.
The article “Who Cares About Forecast Accuracy,” by Robin Hanson is a good discussion of this.
I see people here are having the same misconception about his message that I did before starting it. It’s not “don’t specialize in your career.” It’s more like “don’t specialize in your life.” Good generalists will still specialize, they just do it later after they’ve explored other things.
The “generalists” he’s talking about are people who can think creatively and apply their learnings to different subjects. They can adapt to changes quickly, or even come up with innovations themselves.
“Specialists” are perhaps those that just memorize the formula or are able to identify the same patterns. When outside of the contexts they’re familiar with, they’re not able to do very well. Thus, innovation and changes, even in their field, can be very difficult to cope with.
Essentially what I think he’s advocating for is a liberal arts education instead of a highly focused and specialized. The current state of liberal arts education could still use some updating too, but a highly specialized education that may pay off well in the short term doesn’t seem to help people thrive throughout life.
I feel like specialization is a loaded term, as a way to label a category of work. I've changed stacks numerous times, so I can't say I'm an expert in any one language, stack or business. However, I have skills that feel like are specialization: I'm good at working with multiple stakeholders across the business, debugging unfamiliar systems, and modelling business domains and turning that into maintainable software that multiple people and teams can work on. To me that feels like specialization - I'd be a fish out of water building mobile apps or machine learning models for example - but I suspect most people would call me a generalist.
I think the tendency of generalists is to specialize into a kind of faith in abstract principles, processes and structures that cross domains.
As kids, we mostly learn "do what we're told" because it becomes clear early on that the adults know a lot more than we do. And so by the late teens we are in some degree specialised into the ideals of the previous generation. And then we go out into the world and have to adapt. And that's a space where the specific advices we were given start failing spectacularly, but not for everyone all the time.
In this light, generalists have the quality of survivors: Facing some adversity to any particular pursuit, they aimed to lower their overall risk.
Hi, I am a generalist. I think you're right, but for me, it's not a strategy, it's how I think. My brain is really bad at remembering facts, and really good at seeing patterns and modeling systems.
There's a big divide between people who think "facts" are knowledge and people who think understanding models and systems are knowledge. Our culture fetishizes facts as "knowledge" when most often, what's important is knowing how and why something works. Probably the most effective people who are great at doing both.
Neal Stephenson perhaps said it best:
“Nell," the Constable continued, indicating through his tone of voice that the lesson was concluding, "the difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people—and this is true whether or not they are well-educated—is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations—in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
Today, it is very risky unless you pivot out of the engineering part of your job. Companies are investing in output, not people today. Old school companies invested more in the people side back in the olden times.
A friend of mine from high school is a brilliant person and a very successful manufacturing/process engineer in a specific semiconductor manufacturing process. Whatever it was, industry moved away from it, and he found himself completely unemployable, and at an age where he couldn't get hired as a junior, even at a 50-75% compensation reduction.
He's doing great now, selling real estate and insurance.
Specializing yourself out of a job is certainly something you need to be aware of. There wasn't a lot of demand for Y2K experts in 2002.
I also remember hanging out in a tradeshow booth in the 90s with a consultant who may have been the world expert in performance of a specific, by then legacy, computer architecture. Or someone else who had the inside track and wrote about a company that got acquired and dismantled.
A narrow uber-expertise is fine. But it can become yesterday's news. To be sure, it can also be a legacy in-demand skill but there's no guarantee.
I'm not sure if the great article backs up the thesis necessarily.
Trying to be 'Tiger Woods' by specializing on Golf is probably a recipe for disaster, but focusing on say, 'being a Doctor' from late high school can be a good winner. As the article hints 'the rules are clear' for being a doctor.
Given the clarity of the rules, the 0% unemployment rate etc. 'Doctor' might still be the best profession out there. Surely you can make more at an investment bank, but many (most) do not, whereas if you're an MD you really have to screw up not to do well if you're trying to.
It's not really a 1:1 comparison though. The tightly controlled supply of Medical Residencies leaves you with a higher performing pool of 'Doctors.' You might not become wildly rich at an investment bank, but if you under-perform while specializing as a Doctor, you just don't become a Doctor.
A famous video game coach has a concept he calls the percentage play.
Imagine him reviewing video game footage along with the player after the game. The player would make a successful play. The coach pauses the video and marks a mistake.
"But it worked!"
"It worked in this case. However, it only has a 20% chance of working (due to unreliable teammates, or the opponent making a mistake when they shouldn't). Have you considered this alternative line, which has a 60% chance of success? That's the percentage play."
---
It's also a lesson about not applying NBA advice (where you can expect reliable teammates) to your casual basketball games.
I see myself as a generalist (a guy called me “wideband” once, found it very descriptive). I have heard so many times that I am on the wrong, and so many times I am the right, that I stopped worrying.
It is like the old question whether eggs are part of a healthy diet or not.
It's harder to specialise, takes more effort. Being a generalist is easier specially if you are charismatic. When we try to measure a correlation between success and specialisation, how good one is at it and its value to the economy is an important factor.
Take software for example. There are highly specialised software that costs a lot for a licence while general software like an office suite goes for 5 bucks a month...
Speaking of Software, 90% of the time expert level knowledge is not necessary. On the other hand, broad generalist knowledge is essential for many non-trivial projects to get off the ground. I guess this observation is basically why we have the DevOps movement. A team of people highly specialized in different topics is cool in theory. But in practice a team doesn't work like a brain :-)
I think a lot of people wince at the word “generalist” because, at its worst, it’s synonymous with “somebody with no actual skillset or specialty whatsoever.”
But I've written extensively about the generalist vs. specialist distinction using this definition:
"A generalist is a person with a wider-than-average range of skills and a developed sense of how to apply them to new problems."
One hard part of being a generalist is not knowing how to "train." How do you know what to learn next and how do you measure your progress?
I've been answering that question for myself the past few months and compiled a short handbook of the most practical mental models that I think all self-proclaimed generalists can benefit from knowing, regardless of which domain they work in.
I found the pictures in this article so interesting I struggled to read it. It’s just too bad they didn’t really tie into the topic well. One would have been enough, but they stole the show.
I got the same impression. Those photographs are attention-grabbing but call for a separate article, perhaps on photography, or sports or movement. Besides, the shadows don't align in the same perspective since the photographer took pictures at different times of the day to compose single images, which is even more distracting.
Back in the days of 20th century ambitious, well-funded journalism, it was common to see specialized writers do their boldest, most imaginative work in their first year on the beat.
They also made some newbie mistakes, but on their good days, they saw stuff that the old pros didn't. They asked the "obvious" questions that everyone else had stopped asking. They ventured into areas that according to conventional wisdom were "unimportant" or "not yet significant."
People who had been on the same beat for 10 years or more could reliably generate solid and perhaps even admired work in their specialties. But they worked within shrinking boundaries.
The senior editors who really earned their keep made sure that the rest of us kept rotating into new fields every few years, so that the "wow!" factor never left our work.