Just last week a renown IT magazine that publishes statistics on the sector job market explained:

…Particularly the generalist is in grave danger finding a new job. This group has been negligent in keeping their knowledge up to date. They are now looking for jobs ‘in ICT’ but barely stand a chance because they are behind in knowledge.

Firstly, I think that assumption is a serious mistake in judgement. Besides the obvious point that you cannot become or maintain a position as generalist in a company without having the capacity to do 20 things well, the knowledge level is rarely less deep than the actual specialist. In my time as a specialist I know users actually think you can cough up solutions on the fly, like it doesn’t require any learning process. IT is a lot of googling, trial and error and perseverance. The only exception within the sector is programming because it has a steeper learning curve (combined with trial and error which never disappears with practise). Even here one should be careful to not underestimate the generalist. I’ve picked up after programmers that either couldn’t program that well or ‘just didn’t feel like it that particular day’. By picking up after someone I mean ‘popping the hood’ and fixing what’s wrong instead of having the company I worked for pay a hefty hourly fee to a consultancy company. I’ll grant them the fact that most generalists (including myself) will be incredibly slow programming in Java for the first few months if it is done from scratch. However, there is literally no other job type in IT that the generalist would require more time in doing simply because there is no knowledge deficit. Most likely, the wide band of experience means we’ve probably done it before; only to get bored ‘doing this small task over and over’.

Continue reading →