If I had to pick, I would say it is better to be a specialist. I commented previously in the post referenced in the 1st comment re: swiss army knife or a hammer. My question was: If you have (or want to have) a successful business, are you going to compete better with a whole bunch of swiss army knives or a hammer, a drill, a screwdriver, etc.? I don’t own or run a business BUT I do do some home renovations. My toolbox does not have 55 different swiss army knives it it…

It seems some people are arguing that a person is a generalist if they have done more than one job or switched jobs. I see that a little differently.

I don’t see a specialist as a person who has only done or can only do 1 thing in their life without signifcant and extended new specialized training. Rather I see a specialist as a person who while likely trained or experience in a particular area of expertise will likely be exposed to other things and picks up some other skills or shows other talents and often gets moved or promoted into other roles. I have had this happen in may career moving from technical development to technical management. However I still see that as a specialist. I still need my very specialized technical knowledge to do my management job as a manager of technical projects and people and I see my role as a specialized role as well even though it is a little more generalized than a pure 100% technical person.

Very few people can be truly a 100% generalist or a 100% specialist, although the 100% specialist does exist and they are sometimes a frightening species. :) Most people have to blur the lines a little at some point, but I don’t see having changed roles or having done a few different things in a career path is being a kind of generalist. I see that as an evolving specialist. Whereas to me a true generalist is almost never the subject matter expert on a topic and usually performing multiple tasks on a regular basis or spending only a little time on each subject area, enough to get some proficiency in it and then moving on to the next area to get broad knowledge.

To me a generalist is a person who as the author has alluded to, is often wearing many hats at one time and may not be your go to guy on any of those things but is a very valuable resource for their ability to see the big picture and pull it all together.

The problem with specialization is that, in many cases, one small problem wipes you out, and the repetitive stresses of these jobs often lead to said small problem.

If I listed job titles, I would expect that most would be specialists. Certainly most well paying jobs would be.

Clearly self employed and business execs can be very high paying and would be generalists. Sales and marketing professionals are most likely generalists.

But when you think about all the jobs in the tech industry, in finance, in medicine, in law, these are almost all specialists and most pay pretty well too, some extremely well.

It might just be people see the world from their perch and their inclination and think it mostly leans that way. Maybe its more equally balanced but we can’t see the other side of the world from our perch so we think its small????

I see computer programming specialists where I work and there’s no way I’d take their job, even for $140,000 a year. The computer programmers I work with are so specialized, they have problems communicating with operational staff, have weak or non-existent management skills, and exhibit hardly any common sense when dealing with projects.

Major league ball players often end up in financial trouble after they retire because they need to keep making money but don’t have marketable skills. Some learn how to coach, some learn how to broadcast… all new “hats” (helmets? caps?). Some end up getting in over their heads in the market and devastating their lives. Some manage fast food chains.

I’ve been both and to some extent continue to fill both roles. With some customers I am a specialist and I relish the role. It is rewarding to know that less than a dozen people in the country can provide what you provide. But if that was all I did, personally, I’d lose my mind. I genuinely appreciate the variety in life and work.

Now, if I am to venture a guess on who’s unemployed or not being paid very well compared to the amount of effort they put in I would guess on them being specialized in a sector that is no longer growing and their reluctance to transfer to a different field. Because, when it comes down to it, they do not know a whole lot outside their field that can’t done by anyone else -> the only jobs that are available are walmart greeter, house cleaning, …

Supply and demand completely determine pay levels. Specialization does result in a increased volatility but if the tide is rising, that is, field is growing, this is not easily seen. If a field is growing, supply is likely to be lagging demand and high prices obtain. If supply is abundant (as it will be aroudn the peak and a few decades after), you will find people that more more intelligent and more hardworking than 99% of the rest of the population competing for what has now become average wages exactly as a result of their specialization and their hope that they will be the one to get the promotion rather than the one whose performance was 0.1% worse.

This is called a social trap and you can smell one every time business leaders say there is a shortage of X people.

Fulfillment is a very personal dependence. It can come from the job or from the activities that are likely allowed by the job (buying stuff and paying activity fees). The problem arises mostly if specialists become used to getting remuneratively fulfilled from their jobs and they suddenly find them outcompeted. Here a generalist would have advantages. For instance, it would be easier for a manager to jump sector, say from health care industry to the auto industry; for a specialist, it would be almost impossible to go from doing gram tests to programming a lathe without starting from scratch.

It would be interesting to find out the types of people who make up the vast majority of the unemployed. If I were to guess I would guess they were weighted more towards people who were generalists and weren’t able to provide specific benefits to their employer, or specialists who just weren’t very good at their specialty, or people who couldn’t decide what to do and tried different things (kind of a different kind of a generalist). Some examples include mortgage brokers and real estate agents. I know lots of people who thought they could just jump to one of these jobs in this last decade because there was money to be made there. These are fluff jobs. There is very little skill required to do them. You just need a little personality and some basic job knowledge. It’s not a very specialist kind of job. And I know there are a lot less people employed doing them now than there were 5 years ago.

It seems to me good specialists are less likely to get laid off.

Now as a caveat to that. You better be good. Because if you are a specialists and you only got hired because of a supply shortage which goes away, then you are kind of screwed because there is never a demand for extra specialists who aren’t very good. A generalist does have a better opportunity to find other non-related work.

I am a specialist. I have spent the last (nearly) 15 years working on software that makes the internet work. I know more about how the internet functions than 99.9% of the rest of the world. My generalization in my profession is as broad as knowing both C++ and Javascript. It’s a fairly narrow level of generalization (no, I don’t know why your printer wont print, I definitely don’t know how to fix your refrigerator).

On my last pay statement, my year-to-date pay was $138,446. I have companies competing for me. I get recruiters regularly sending unsolicited messages asking if I’d be interested in joining their company. I had a friend and former co-worker who runs a business over for a Christmas party the other day, he told me that if I was ever considering leaving my current company, he hoped I’d consider going to his.

This is because *I’m good at internet software*.

You say “it’s quite possible that someone more accomplished at the one skill upon which you are relying is applying for that same job.” You’re right, I’m not the best person in the world at this sort of thing. There are people better than me, and there are people who have slightly different specializations than mine who are better at slightly different things. This doesn’t matter though — there are way more open positions for people who are good than there are good people. You don’t have to be the best in the world, being in the top 1% is still plenty good enough to have more than one job offer on the table.

If I’d only focused 1/4 as much as I have, and spent the other 3/4 of the time trying to be a printer, author, and clarinetist, this career would not be available to me.

This is bullcrap too:
“Generalism leads to a more fulfilling life.”

Because I’ve focused my career in one specific area doesn’t mean I’m unfulfilled otherwise. I do lots of other things, just not professionally. I’m not good enough at my hobbies to get paid for them, but that’s ok, because I have a fantastic career in internet software that pays quite well. Here’s a link to my flickr photo set page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tylerkaraszewski/sets/ I like to share that with people when they imply that my life must suck otherwise because my career doesn’t. Does it look like I’m having more or less fun than you? What about your readers, the one’s your discouraging from doing what I did, does it look like I’m having more or less fun than them?

And I’m only 28, you’re what, five years older than me? Imagine where I’ll be by then.

They wanted us to be good at many IT things, but to pick a small area of IT and become exceptional in that area. They called that type of education T shaped, saying that the shallow knowledge was the top of the T, and the deep knowledge in a smaller area is the deep vertical pole of the T.

Two years out of school, and so far it has served me well. I am an excellent Linux system administrator and extremely competitive for being out of school just 2 years. I am also good (but not excellent) at Windows administration, network administration, web development, Java programming, geo-information systems, database management and lots of other areas.

Instead of pitching myself as “Jack of all trades, master of none”, I can say “I am an expert at Linux administration, but I can help out as needed in lots of areas”.

But other than a business that is small and needs someone specifically to wear many hats, I would argue that the instances of people succeeding employment wise and career wise (not self employed wise), is a drastic tilt towards specialism. People who go to college and get a liberal arts degree or a general business degree without any speciality often end up managing a taco bell, or maybe doing something a little better but not even remotely related to what they thought they were going to school for because they didn’t get a degree targeted towards a specialized job.

As a Software development Manager I know that back in the hay days of the dot com explosion you could get a development job with a philosophy degree and experience having played with HTML. That was a complete market dislocation that drastically altered the typical case. Today, if you don’t have a specific computer degree and have excelled in it, there is no sense in applying, you won’t be considered.

Now you may very well enjoy your life more if you are well rounded. And you may be more likely to succeed at a self employed business too (although I would argue that is as much personality and natural ability as it is well rounded education/experience, and some luck), but I would not recommend it to someone just starting college asking me for advice of what to major in. I would advise them to spend time figuring out the following things:

1. What do you enjoy.
2. What are you good at.
3. What fields does the market currently reward financially.
4. What fields does the market currently have good demand for and good prospects for.

Find a place where a lot of those overlap and that you can be happy and then become as good at that as you can.

I don’t know many people who want to put “Jack of all trades, master of none.” on their resume. It is worth considering why that cliche exists.

For money, I think specialists get the edge. But, with the caveat you have to be one of the best specialists!