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Jason F
Jason F

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Do you consider yourself to be a generalist? Why or why not?

One of the hardest things for me to do in my career is focus on one specific technology or language for a lengthy period of time. This has led me down an interesting path so far. I've worked on behemoth monoliths in C#, worked as a front end developer using Angular and Angular Material, and now am working almost exclusively in Azure. I've learned a lot, but would never say that I'm an expert in any of them. I would consider myself to be a generalist. Do you consider yourself to be a generalist?

Top comments (5)

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jouo profile image
Jashua • Edited

I personally don't like that term, generalist sounds like someone is highly proficient in many areas, which in enterprise standards is probably not the case (most of the time)

I've learned and worked with different tools and languages but I would never call myself a generalist, I just like to get my feet wet in different areas to have a better understanding of the whole process

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bitforth profile image
Alan

I consider myself a generalist, but as of lately I've been shifting more towards a specialist approach. Throughout my career I have worked with the following technologies/languages:

  • C++
  • Visual Basic
  • C#
  • Java
  • JavaScript/Node.js (and a half a dozen of frameworks)
  • HTML/CSS
  • PHP
  • Python
  • Ruby
  • Perl
  • TypeScript
  • AWS
  • Google Cloud
  • Azure
  • MySQL
  • SQL Server
  • MongoDB
  • Docker and Kubernetes
  • Postgres
  • Redis

However, over the last 3 years, I've been diving deep on JavaScript and TypeScript. I really want to become a world-class expert writing JavaScript and working with JavaScript stacks.

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tanami profile image
Tanami

I am not a generalist in the sense that I am acutely familiar with every single thing about the technologies I use, but I am definitely a generalist in the sense that I work to identify the domain-transferable knowledge in all the things that I do. In addition to this, I definitely try to build generalised models of the things that I work with, i.e. what it means to be an actor in a system that I write, and what parts of that model I can use for something else (or what constituents). does that make sense?

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gcgbarbosa profile image
George C. G. Barbosa

Yes, generalist here.

Not only in terms of technical skills, but I have been reading psychology, game theory, cognitive science, and others. I found those to be extremely helpful.

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bitwisecrypto profile image
bitwise-crypto

yes, i always feel intrested to learn everything in programming.... i know it sounds dumb, but thats my goal.
!