The easiest way to standout in the Job market
Why generalists will win in our specialized world
It’s crazy how a book written 3 years before the AI boom arrived, can be so accurate.
In Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein shares why being a specialist might no longer be the best career choice, even though our world is becoming much more specialized.
So what is a generalist?
It’s NOT about being a T-shaped engineer! (although it has some benefits, which we’ll cover later).
It’s about having multiple, seemingly unrelated, skills & experiences.
Today, I’m going to cover:
General VS specialized work
The 3 levels of generalists:
Level 1 - the specialist generalist
Level 2 - the industry generalist
Level 3 - the career generalist
Why Specialists will always be needed
General VS specialized work
Some work requires a specialist.
Epstein uses examples from the sports world. In some sports, the best athletes are the ones who started very young, and practice hundreds of thousands of hours throughout their lives. In other sports, some of the best players didn’t even start playing it until their teens!
So what’s the difference?
The type of task required in the sport.
In sports with very specific and repetitive tasks, tons of practicing and ‘specialization’ is the best way to be the best. There are 2 great examples in the book:
Golf - where there is very little variance in contrast to other sports. Tiger Woods practiced like crazy since the age of 2!
Chess - here Epstein shares "one of the most amazing experiments… in the history of human education.". Laszlo Polgar wanted to prove to the world that he knew how to create world champions in any area by using his custom education systems. So he trained his 3 girls to be chess players, and they ALL became world-class players! (You might know one of them, Judit Polgar)
The problem with the specialist approach, is that very rarely real life resembles Golf or Chess.
It’s much closer to Tennis, where the most famous player is Roger Federer. Federer played many sports as a child: skiing, wrestling, basketball, swimming, handball, soccer, skateboarding, and of course, Tennis. Only later in his childhood did he decide to specialize in Tennis.
The main argument of the book is that all the other types of sports helped Federer become a better Tennis player - and so will having a diverse skill-set will help your career.
The 3 types of generalists
When people talk about being a generalist, they usually refer to the first type, which is a very narrow application of the ‘generalism’ principle.
Level 1 - The specialist-generalist
I’ll give you a few examples.
A backend engineer who is willing to work with Java, Python, and NodeJS.
A Frontend engineer working with both React and Vue.
A mobile developer creating both Android and iOS apps.
To a lesser extent, a full-stack developer is also such an example - you still specialize in writing software…
No doubt it gives you some advantage, as you master concepts that are shared between the technologies you use.
But you are still like everyone else.
Level 2 - the industry generalist
Having experience in different roles inside the same industry.
Let’s take the Tech world as an example.
A QA engineer who becomes a software engineer
A software engineer who becomes a PM
A UX designer who becomes a frontend developer
Such experiences give you a big advantage in the new role! The best PMs I worked with were ex-engineers, and some of the best front-end developers were ex-UX designers. This is not by chance - the skills gained in the ‘previous’ career help you stand out and be better at your job.
I put myself in this category - spending a few years in DevOps roles, helped me be a much better Software Engineer!
The lesson here is NOT that you need to switch a career, but that learning an additional job can differentiate you.
Let’s say you want to become a front-end engineer. Instead of taking one more ReactJS course, take a UX-designer on, and understand the deeper principles of design work.
If you want to become a backend engineer - instead of going deeper into Python/NodeJS, do some K8s/Docker courses.
A small note on startups
Early engineers in startups MUST be generalists!
covers in this great podcast episode the huge value generalists provided in the early days of Facebook and Dropbox.If you are a domain expert, you must have the mental flexibility to WANT to learn new things
Level 3 - the career generalist
These are the REAL generalists the book talks about.
People who are willing to ‘throw away’ their experience, and start a completely new career. I met Kayla Marie Paden on LinkedIn, who moved from teaching music to being a front-end developer.
Can you imagine the difficulties of such a change? Starting from scratch, in your 30s or even 40s, years behind everyone else.
Epstein claims that more people should take those leaps. The skills you learned are not lost - you’ll never know when they’ll be useful.
Specialists will always be needed
I’m not saying there is no place for specialists. Some tasks are very hard to do, and it takes years to learn and master them.
Becoming an aerospace engineer is not something you just decide to do on a whim.
In my opinion, the need for specialists in the software world will start to decline. Android-native developers will still be in need, but with the advance of AI, the knowledge gap between specialists and everyone else has become much lower.
With ChatGPT, you can get a specialist advisor right by your side… And it only gets better with time.
Still, there are some benefits of being a specialized, at least in the upcoming decade 🙃. The balanced way to go about it is to be a T-shaped developer. You can read more about the concept in
’s great articleFinal words
Every one of us has a 100% unique combination of skills.
Show me another Russian+Hebrew+English speaker, with experience in Unity3D, DevOps, and Fullstack development, who worked for 4 years in the AgTech industry, and has a commercial drone pilot license.
I’ll probably never use all those skills at the same time, but I believe that having unique experiences throughout your career is the best way to go :)
If you enjoyed the article and want to read more related books, check out this list on BookWiz:
What we enjoyed reading this week
Unspoken Startup Folk Wisdom by
. I related to every one of the wisdoms shared, and none of them are trivial!Better tools, better companies by
. I love the techno-industrial articles in Not Boring. So many things clicked in my mind since I started to read about it.Time sinks vs Money sinks by
. A very interesting take on the 2 most common business models.
See you next week,
Anton & Orel