<story><title>Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality</title><url>https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/10/09/generalists-vs-specialists-gamedev-tool-quality-tim-cain</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nitwit005</author><text>The generalist&amp;#x27;s resume looks worse. They have 2 years experience with (insert role here), compared to the other guy who has 8, because they&amp;#x27;ve worked in multiple roles.&lt;p&gt;Some industries have realized they want some people who have multiple skills, such as the &amp;quot;full stack engineer&amp;quot; roles, but it seems rather more common to prefer someone who precisely fits into the specialist role they defined.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vk6flab</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been in the workforce for almost 40 years as an ICT professional. In my experience there&amp;#x27;s lots of other things going on in addition to the point you make.&lt;p&gt;People flat-out don&amp;#x27;t believe that the skills enumerated on my resume could be held by a single person, and are.&lt;p&gt;Apparently, I&amp;#x27;m clearly &amp;quot;over the hill&amp;quot;, having been at this for nearly 40 years. I should state that I have 20+ years experience instead, as-if having life experience doesn&amp;#x27;t actually make you better qualified to understand the contexts of any role in an organisation.&lt;p&gt;My skill-set is &amp;quot;threatening&amp;quot; to others, because, apparently, knowing things about a great many technologies means that I know more than the person hiring me, which somehow means that I&amp;#x27;m a threat. As-if surrounding yourself by people who are smarter than you is suddenly undesirable.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been told to &amp;quot;dumb down&amp;quot; my resume because there&amp;#x27;s too much there, even if there&amp;#x27;s 99% chance that a computer will be the device actually reading it and selecting me. Apparently I&amp;#x27;m supposed to &amp;quot;infiltrate&amp;quot; a company at a lower level and then &amp;quot;show&amp;quot; them that I can do more, despite 40 years experience showing that people only see the skills that they want to see.&lt;p&gt;According to some automated job technologies I have 104 years of experience. Not sure how that works.&lt;p&gt;Then there are those who want to know which of the experience is &amp;quot;professional&amp;quot; and which isn&amp;#x27;t. (I&amp;#x27;ve been self-employed for the past 23+ years)&lt;p&gt;In the end, I liken it to this:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;How much experience do you have in eating food?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Do you mean, adding together each of the 15 minute meals, or how long have I been eating food for since I was born?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Okay, how much professional experience do you have eating food?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;...&amp;quot;</text></comment>
<story><title>Why decline in generalists leads to disjointed games and harms tool quality</title><url>https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/10/09/generalists-vs-specialists-gamedev-tool-quality-tim-cain</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nitwit005</author><text>The generalist&amp;#x27;s resume looks worse. They have 2 years experience with (insert role here), compared to the other guy who has 8, because they&amp;#x27;ve worked in multiple roles.&lt;p&gt;Some industries have realized they want some people who have multiple skills, such as the &amp;quot;full stack engineer&amp;quot; roles, but it seems rather more common to prefer someone who precisely fits into the specialist role they defined.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Justsignedup</author><text>Hell, I experience this a lot. My experience is doing a lot of things, and being a force multiplier. However you go to a larger company, and suddenly they&amp;#x27;re looking for very specific experience doing specific scaling that I never got to do in all my roles, boom, it is terrible for my resume. And many young people see this and just decide that let&amp;#x27;s just focus on that, and make a great resume, rather than try to be useful.&lt;p&gt;I could have come into a job and say &amp;quot;okay, I know back end, let me focus on that&amp;quot; but instead I spent a day installing a shitty data pipeline that more or less took us through the next 4 years of data analytical needs for almost no cost. Etc.&lt;p&gt;It is just how it is. I even read a post on HN about a decade ago about how a guy was hire #1, was instrumental in the growth of a company, and when it was purchased was pushed out because they didn&amp;#x27;t need a generalist anymore, they needed a specialist. And so he decided to drop the generalist role and focus entirely on one technical aspect to the benefit of his career.&lt;p&gt;So while I agree with Tim, I also have to say, as someone in the thick of it, there&amp;#x27;s no good way out. Unless you want to keep working for Seed &amp;#x2F; Series A startups, fingers crossed they sell or you won&amp;#x27;t make that okay payoff.</text></comment>