A question on software specialties inspired this question.How valuable is a software generalist compared to a specialist? When I say generalist, I mean someone who can take a project from requirements to deployment, and is competent with all phases of the software development lifecycle. Someone who can put all the specialties together into a cohesive whole. An expert generalist knows his or her weaknesses and fills them by relying on specialists - example: Oracle specialists or UX specialists.What do you see as the ultimate career path of the software generalist?
What is the career path for a software generalist?
career development
The ultimate career path of the software generalist is to become the one person IT army, able to take on any problem involving code of any kind as a self-employed mercenary.  I'd imagine such people would be extremely rare, but they may exist somewhere. ;)The generalist may have the challenge of maintaining their skill set as I'd imagine most people in this role would end up specializing a bit in terms of what they experience as it isn't often that a company would give the same guy the opportunity to know every kind of system,e.g. CRM, ERP and CMS to name a few by acronym.  There are various points between the generalist and specialist though as something like web development could be seen as being rather general or rather specialized depending on one's view.