As a self professed generalist this is one of the things I advertise about myself. I’ve given up trying to signal mastery in anything but my ability to figure things out with the help of things like vague awareness, trained over years of doing and exposing myself to as much as possible.
I’m not a very good salesman until I get my foot in the door. My resume is admittedly pretty honest about all of the cool stuff I’ve done, which happen to be not confined to one niche. So for better or worse I haven’t tailored my resume to particular roles nor found it easy to. I agree it’s not easy. If I were in a position to hire someone I’d like a team of generalists advised by one or two specialists until more expertise is needed. I get why companies would want a perfect vertical fit in theory but I think that leads to resume embellishing at best or an opportunity cost in hiring someone that’s self sufficient and capable to do the work now.
This situational awareness becomes hugely important as your career proceeds and you take on roles with larger scope. It’s one of the reasons I shake my head when someone describes themselves as a “front end developer” or a “Java developer” as if that were their identity. If you want your career to last more than ten years, you have to recognize that no, you are a “software developer”, and even better, a “solution developer”. To be able to do that well, you have to take time to pay attention to what’s going on in general.
This is actually my selling point to friends about this site. A couple years of even just reading the front page titles every couple of days and some comments really helps with the awareness. Most of my CS awareness comes just from that, and people are impressed that I can name a dozen languages they’ve never heard of and their one defining feature [1]. It’s shallow knowledge, I’ll admit, but, like going to university, I know where to go for similar things and that someone has studied a problem before.
[1]: I recently gave a small language tour of 36 langs and their defining feature (without esolangs) without research. Basically just name+key feature. And I could probably link a post/comment here that introduced me to each one.
As a self professed generalist this is one of the things I advertise about myself. I’ve given up trying to signal mastery in anything but my ability to figure things out with the help of things like vague awareness, trained over years of doing and exposing myself to as much as possible.
How do you sell yourself on a resume? Job hunting as a generalist is not easy.
I’m not a very good salesman until I get my foot in the door. My resume is admittedly pretty honest about all of the cool stuff I’ve done, which happen to be not confined to one niche. So for better or worse I haven’t tailored my resume to particular roles nor found it easy to. I agree it’s not easy. If I were in a position to hire someone I’d like a team of generalists advised by one or two specialists until more expertise is needed. I get why companies would want a perfect vertical fit in theory but I think that leads to resume embellishing at best or an opportunity cost in hiring someone that’s self sufficient and capable to do the work now.
This situational awareness becomes hugely important as your career proceeds and you take on roles with larger scope. It’s one of the reasons I shake my head when someone describes themselves as a “front end developer” or a “Java developer” as if that were their identity. If you want your career to last more than ten years, you have to recognize that no, you are a “software developer”, and even better, a “solution developer”. To be able to do that well, you have to take time to pay attention to what’s going on in general.
This is actually my selling point to friends about this site. A couple years of even just reading the front page titles every couple of days and some comments really helps with the awareness. Most of my CS awareness comes just from that, and people are impressed that I can name a dozen languages they’ve never heard of and their one defining feature [1]. It’s shallow knowledge, I’ll admit, but, like going to university, I know where to go for similar things and that someone has studied a problem before.
[1]: I recently gave a small language tour of 36 langs and their defining feature (without esolangs) without research. Basically just name+key feature. And I could probably link a post/comment here that introduced me to each one.