I tried Generalism and I hated it

Web developers are often discouraged from being a generalist, but I have only met a few who listened.

Generalism is defined as studying or an attempt to master different things, instead of one. On the flip side, specialism is about being focused on mastering a single thing, rather than many.

In tech, my experience with generalism, specialism, and whatever is in-between (often called hybridism) is somewhat of a reason why I am writing about generalism as I have found myself in too much of a situation whereby I had allowed the need or demand for a skill to determine what I should learn, hence leading me to learn and want to keep learning everything at every aspect of web development.

I remember having a conversation with myself and that conversation concluded that I enjoy working on the frontend of the web more than the backend, but frontend development alone wasn’t a lucrative adventure I would love to embark and this was mostly due to the financial prospect of being a generalist in tech; a developer that knows how to write good frontend code, build robust web backend applications, and manage the deployment of web applications to the cloud.

Generalism is not bad

I am not against generalism, far from it. I believe we need generalists in this uncertain world of ours. My issue with generalism is that conversations about it are often made as a rebuttal to the idea of specialism. Well, generalism is more nuanced than that. It’s not always the opposite of specialism.

My experience with generalism is related to the speed at which a skill or much-needed expertise can be acquired in tech. Requirements of tech roles are ever-changing and it is difficult to keep up, which is why trying to learn multiple skills with the same amount of time you would use to learn just a few is a bad strategy. I found a study about the choice of either generalism or specialism and the speed at which an industry evolves.

The research compared mathematicians working in fields that experienced rapid change (mainly subfields of mathematical analysis, such as integral equations, partial differential equations, and Fourier analysis) with those working in less affected fields (mainly subfields of algebra and geometry, such as rings and algebras and combinatorics). They then tracked the performance of over 4,000 mathematicians across the period 1980–2000 — 10 years before and 10 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union — using an extensive data set of publication and citation data provided by the American Mathematical Society.

When Generalists Are Better Than Specialists, and Vice Versa
Source: https://hbr.org/2018/07/when-generalists-are-better-than-specialists-and-vice-versa

There are lots of takes about generalism and specialism on the internet and I think some of them echo my thoughts and the thoughts of most people. At the end of the “debate,” most people share their experiences and there are diverse, yet subjective opinions about this.

The idea of hybridism

The idea that you can pick a skill and master it in isolation is also not the answer. Tech stacks are often not used in isolation, which will make it difficult for anyone to just focus on one. It’s like saying a company will hire a PHP developer separately, and hire an SQL expert as well. The chances of this happening are slim. That is why learning just PHP alone won’t cut it, and why it was a better idea to combine multiple skill sets to make a backend developer or a frontend developer.

I learned about hybridism sometime ago and it seems to be the intersection between generalism and specialism. Hybridism is about developing expertise in two or more distinct areas, with possible patterns or connections between such areas. An example of this is expertise in design and frontend development or mathematics and data analytics.

I started to learn more about hybridism and I realized that I do have two aspects of my work that I enjoy the most. I had been a generalist for most of my career and I hated how it made me feel. I wasn’t able to dedicate time to the things I am most passionate about and it made me less motivated towards other things, thereby making me less efficient. I have decided to focus on web frontend engineering and treat every other skill I have acquired as a hobby.

In conclusion

If you find yourself in the same situation as I did, try to take stock of your career, to focus on the things that make you happy, give you a sense of fulfillment, and of course is economically viable. On another note, some people enjoy being a generalist, and that’s also fine.