I work as a Site Reliability Engineer at tech companies and my job is totally an Expert Generalist. Sometimes I'm optimizing javascript, sometimes I'm working on security, sometimes I'm building clusters in AWS, and sometimes I'm writing dashboards. It's all about being reasonably wide and deep at the same time.

Wow. This makes me want to throw my hat back in the ring. I'm a software engineer who got laid off and is exploring teaching computer science. This article describes me to a T.

I'm the sort of person who, early in my career, took an OpenStep job because it was an interesting OS/framework I wanted to try before NeXT went out of business. (Apple bought them, OpenStep became the basis for all their OSes, and I don't code on Apple, but the tech was the inspiration for how everyone talks to databases these days.)

I tell recruiters, "no, I haven't used that specific tech, but I can describe the algorithms behind it." It's not an easy sell in this market, when they probably can find someone with 10 years of that experience. I don't blame them if they suspect I'm bluffing.

But I absolutely agree with the article that general knowledge is more important than ever. Using a LLM coding assistant is a lot like having a really naive intern. You need to know what questions to ask in order to suss out the subtle bugs it may introduce.

Stepping back from software, I think the general skill they are looking for is critical thinking...which is so rarely taught these days.

This reminds me of when I was hired as a design project manager: I've done some UX, I've done some HTML, I've been the account rep, I've done tech support, and I know enough about programming & design to talk to programmers and designers. As an occasional ersatz creative director I might not always know good from great, but I definitely know good from bad.

I have always struggled to describe my job and the way I approach it, as a non-engineer working in an engineering field, and this is exactly it, after 15 years!

I've seen the same challenges in healthcare. Hospitals have a clear understanding of the value proposition associated with specialists: they do specific things, like fixing specific parts on the insides of patients -- and the hospital gets paid. Throughout my career I've struggled to "sell" my value proposition as a generalist, which is often much less direct: I will be here and find ways to make things better.

There are programs trying to turn specialists, like surgeons, into generalist innovators -- the Stanford Biodesign program is a notable example -- but I think it's hard to get people who were drawn to deep, narrow specialization like cardiac surgery to suddenly be able to zoom out and notice broad structural patterns.

My take is that the key value of a generalist in a setting full of specialists (like in software development or an academic medical center) is to keep a broader perspective, seeing connections and patterns to harness the expertise of all those specialists to make things better.

Also, the book "Range" by David Epstein does a great job getting deeper into this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range:_Why_Generalists_Triumph_in_a_Specialized_World

Reading about generalists and expert generalists in particular always makes me think of Michael Clayton.