Nathan Ford recently wrote a blog called Be Mega, focusing on being a generalist. As a frustrated generalist, I found this article triggered some of my reservations with having never specialized.

Like I said, I’m a generalist. I’ve held a number of positions within the jobs and projects I’ve had (front-end developer, back-end developer, information architect, designer, analyst, content writer, editor, marketing coordinator, manager, tech support, customer support, teacher) all of these as “focused” roles, which means they were my primary concern at the time, for a short time.

Don’t get me wrong, the role of generalist is exciting, but it’s equal parts frustrating for two main reasons.

Nobody Hires a Generalist

Trying to explain to someone, be they a recruiter, a friend or an in-law what you do is extremely difficult. Hell, most of the time I don’t even know what I do. This confusion mainifests itself both in conversations and on paper. It’s true, once you’re in an organization or on a project, being a generalist will keep you valuable to the organization, but trying to get in the door with a resume that says “I can do anything” can be extremely frustrating.

At my last job, it was tough to leave because on one hand, I played so many roles in the organization that they couldn’t really hire one person to replace me (tough for the org), and any time I went for a job interview, the recruiter saw me as “Junior at Everything” (tough for me).

Not Enough Butter Over Too Much Bread

By now everyone’s heard Malcom Gladwell’s “10,000 hours” idea, and whether or not you agree with it, I think we can all agree that it takes time to get really good at something. When you’re constantly switching gears, that gets extremely hard to do.

Now I’m the type of person who doesn’t believe in doing a bad job at anything, so you’ll get my best effort on anything you give me, but even at my best effort, I’m taking longer to do it than a specialist (lack of process and existing resources) and the quality will be lower than a specialist (less skill/practice). As someone who always does their homework, this is really disheartening because when I compare my work to those around me its almost always worse than those I admire. I’m constantly behind the wave on everything. The latest shakes on HTML5? I’m still catching up on MVC and AJAX. NoSQL? Still learning RDBS. 

I think that more than anything else is what drives me nuts. I feel like I’m constantly behind the guys I want to emulate.

Look – it’s not all bad. I get to do a lot of interesting things, and unlike a specialist, I’m able to roll with the punches. I’m less likely to be let go due to a slight change in priority, but I think it takes all types.

Part of it is my personality. I’m the kind of guy who restarts RPG video games once a month with a new class/build combo to try out, so “staying power” isn’t really in my genome. 

I’d love to hear how other people in the community feel about this kind of thing – especially from other generalists. Am I alone in these frustrations?