My mother says a specialist is someone who knows more and more about less and less until they know absolutely everything about nothing, and a generalist is someone who knows less and less about more and more until they know absolutely nothing about everything.
I've been partial to Heinlein's idea of the "general specialist" lately:<p>"Computermen sent up to install Mike were on short-term bonus contracts— get job done fast before irreversible physiologlcal change marooned them four hundred thousand kilometers from home. But despite two training tours I was not gung-ho computerman; higher maths are beyond me. Not really electronics engineer, nor physicist. May not have been best micromachinist in Luna and certainly wasn’t cybernetics psychologist. But I knew more about all these than a specialist knows—I’m general specialist. Could relieve a cook and keep orders coming or field-repair your suit and get you back to airlock still breathing."<p>from <i>The Moon is a Harsh Mistress</i>
This essay focuses only on expanding knowledge within programming and business, but I think to truly be successful, you need to generalize outside of programming too.<p>My favorite example that I like to repeat often is that as a Site Reliability Engineer, more than once my knowledge of sports, entertainment, politics and current events have been quite relevant to my job.<p>When we were trying to figure out why people suddenly stopped watching Netflix in Mexico and Brazil, it was important to know that there was an exhibition match in Soccer/Football between the two countries, and knowing that that was culturally important and something that they would be using the TV for instead of Netflix.
In other words, the importance of being T-shaped: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills</a>
Specialist .-<p>Being a specialist/senior dev you can get up to 120-160k/year for languages like ruby, rails, go, java, js, .NET, c++, etc. You can give speeches, write books, etc.<p>As a 'generalist' you'll be between 60-80k at most, because everyone will hire you as a <i>entry level</i> programmer in their stack since you're not <i>expert</i>.
I agree with this advice, and especially the follow up comments about being well-rounded in general.<p>But one thing I hate is when a business or a manager tries to politicize this whole "t-shaped skills" buzzword, by arguing that importance of generalist skills entitles the business or manager to almost completely disregard someone's specialization.<p>If you hired someone as a machine learning expert, and instead you've got them working on a legacy Ruby on Rails codebase or going down some rabbit hole about containerization, then it's gone too far. Yet politically, this will be defended endlessly in the name of "team player" and "business bottom line" HR code words.<p>But specialization of labor is hugely important to society. We need people to be deep experts, and for the trend of getting deeper and deeper into a field to continue, and well-defined roles within an organization are important for this. And yes, this does require managers and planners to work very hard to actually understand the business's needs, so that they can hire a machine learning engineer when they need one, instead of hiring one, then trying to repurpose the engineer into a Rails engineer by appealing to "be a team player" nonsense.<p>Any way, I think it's just important that as good as generalization, well-roundedness, and basic curiosity are, developers and knowledge workers especially have to be really pedantic and adamant that businesses respect specializations. Don't let the politicization of "be a generalist" get used as an excuse for your employer to stop respecting your specialization.<p>This is a major reason why I dislike the trend of "full-stack" development. It's great when developers really do have full-stack skills. But it's a huge red flag about a company when they actually want, and encourage, people to work in an essentially purely generalist capacity. It can often mean the company is either trying to get by cheaply (i.e. they're happy with relatively lower quality work from a generalist working in a specific area that is not the generalist's specialization) instead of seeking higher quality solutions through the appropriate specialists, or else they are just not doing the hard work of actually mapping their business needs correctly onto the skills that different specialists have, meaning that "full-stack" is just a hiring buzzword to avoid hard work somewhere up the staffing foodchain, and build in plausible deniability when it doesn't work out (e.g. "But we hired full-stack people...").
You should be enough of a generalist to understand how your part fits into the whole. You also need to be enough of a specialist to do your part really, really well.<p>Also, get into several specialities as you move along on your career. I'm almost 40 years old, and can list quite a few specialities in my resume.
Think of your career as being a generalist, but learn things like a specialist.<p>You want the opportunity to work on a wide array of problems so you build a repertoire of solutions and insights that can be applied to various problems.<p>Being a full-stack engineer is a great place to start, but it's limiting because you never gain enough depth beyond plugging together front-end, back-end and off-the-shelf components.<p>Instead, you want to rotate between various roles so you can focus on different areas. This way you can understand the pitfalls and best practices of certain systems (like infrastructure, queues, machine learning, angular, etc).
Another specialist/generalist vector I've encountered... at a lot of startups, they're looking for a "full stack developer" (generalist). Which is fine when staff is limited. But when you're a big company and you have a product that costs a thousand dollars a minute when it's offline and the database crashes, who do you want looking at the database... the girl who's lived and breathed nothing but Oracle for the past 15 years, or that full stack dude?
You'd never to go to a neurologist to get a ACL reconstruction. In other professions, specialization is seen more respectfully and also pretty vital. Whenever I interview with startups, I get a feeling they want "generalists" because they need to get the same amount of work without hiring a lot of people. I'd personally prefer specialists but are inquisitive enough to jump on random things and can move the boat without waiting for someone.
Short answer - between the two - specialize is superior.<p>If money matters to you - its easy to figure - hrs x price. Your price generally is higher if you specialize. Best thing is to be a rare bird - expert in something very valuable that few people can do.<p>You can eat good just doing basic web dev (for the time being at least), but if you're very ambitious - to really outperform - you'll want to be more special than that.