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...").