<story><title>Short fat engineers are undervalued</title><url>https://nested.substack.com/p/short-fat-engineers-are-undervalued</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>whoisjuan</author><text>The argument of specialist vs generalist is futile. They simple fit in distinct parts of the journey and evolution of a software product.&lt;p&gt;Generalists are highly valuable for many types of orgs and projects especially nascent projects. But sometimes you need the precise output of a specialist to achieve something.&lt;p&gt;If my business has a product that is highly dependent of let&amp;#x27;s say OpenGL, then an OpenGL specialist will generate more specific output that someone who knows a little of OpenGL and a lot of other things.&lt;p&gt;However, there&amp;#x27;s always the counterargument that generalists can compensate with their holistic view and understanding of problems throughout the whole stack. I understand this and agree with it, but I think there&amp;#x27;s a point in every innovation where the generalist contribution declines sharply. And I&amp;#x27;m saying this as a generalist.&lt;p&gt;If you are a generalist and you feel undervalued, you&amp;#x27;re likely in the wrong project or too involved in phases of a project where your contribution can&amp;#x27;t move the needle significantly anymore.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>hinkley</author><text>Diversity.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve had a conversation with a few bosses where at some point I stopped to say words to the effect of, &amp;quot;It&amp;#x27;s like you think I expect everyone a the project to be like me. I don&amp;#x27;t.&amp;quot; &amp;lt;looks of surprise&amp;gt; A project with just me would have problems too. But every project needs at least a couple of people who think like me, which we aren&amp;#x27;t accomplishing.&lt;p&gt;This whole expert thing isn&amp;#x27;t tenable on a long term project. The expert will get bored and wander off, at which point all the mistakes they avoided will just be explored in their absence.  Unless they built up people, documentation and processes to take over the work.&lt;p&gt;My read of Kernighan&amp;#x27;s Law, back-ported onto my own philosophy, is that most of the time you don&amp;#x27;t want the most capable person working on a solution. You want the 2nd or 3rd most capable person on it, have them reach consensus with the other two. Maybe 10% of your code should be as clever as you can manage. Most of the rest should be so boring that only the junior people find it interesting. The bottom rungs of an orchard ladder everyone is trying to climb.</text></comment>
<story><title>Short fat engineers are undervalued</title><url>https://nested.substack.com/p/short-fat-engineers-are-undervalued</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>whoisjuan</author><text>The argument of specialist vs generalist is futile. They simple fit in distinct parts of the journey and evolution of a software product.&lt;p&gt;Generalists are highly valuable for many types of orgs and projects especially nascent projects. But sometimes you need the precise output of a specialist to achieve something.&lt;p&gt;If my business has a product that is highly dependent of let&amp;#x27;s say OpenGL, then an OpenGL specialist will generate more specific output that someone who knows a little of OpenGL and a lot of other things.&lt;p&gt;However, there&amp;#x27;s always the counterargument that generalists can compensate with their holistic view and understanding of problems throughout the whole stack. I understand this and agree with it, but I think there&amp;#x27;s a point in every innovation where the generalist contribution declines sharply. And I&amp;#x27;m saying this as a generalist.&lt;p&gt;If you are a generalist and you feel undervalued, you&amp;#x27;re likely in the wrong project or too involved in phases of a project where your contribution can&amp;#x27;t move the needle significantly anymore.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yumraj</author><text>As a generalist, I agree with bulk of what you&amp;#x27;re saying but at least my personal experience seems to echo the fact that generalists in general are undervalued since when someone asks a person &amp;quot;what can you do for me&amp;quot;, a specialist always has a better and sharper answer than a generalist - and that makes all the difference.&lt;p&gt;Personally I&amp;#x27;ll take a generalist any day since specialists suffer from the &amp;quot;if you only have a hammer everything looks like a nail&amp;quot; syndrome.&lt;p&gt;Having said that, my 1 career advice to anyone would be, become a specialist in 1-single thing, and then become a generalist in everything else. I&amp;#x27;m not that, but I feel that that I would have been best served if I had been that.</text></comment>