specialist vs generalist

Hello People,

I want to know what yall think about this,
generalist vs speclaist,

obiviously generalising and speclizing both have its advantages and disadvantages,
A personal background of me,
i being working in IT close to 5 years,

first 3 years i did a little bit of everything and did a bit of servers,desktop,network you name it i touched it a little bit as a all rounder.

last two years i specalised in the public cloud and SAAS solutions,
so in my last two years i being implementing 0365 and google apps along with identity and access management solutions with fim/adfs stuff as well as some infrastructure support work.
I lost my job 2 months ago and i am job hunting and i got a verbal offer for a role thats close to 80k package which is good and humbling alot of my salary is due to my specalising in cloud and saas solutions and my new job is called field engineer or something
and the last salary i was on was 60k and worked my ass off.

I know alot of people that spececlaised in sharepoint,lync/voip,crm and after only working in IT for like 3 or 5 years and all they did was their speclaised technology and now they are senior developers with their corresponding technology or solution arcitectts in their corresponding technology.

I believe that is amazing because they specalised and in 3 to 5 years they become seniors or arcitect that is so cool, i wanna do that
but what happens when these technologies die out or is not in demand when they go job hopping,

I had a chat with a lot of seniors vetrans in IT you know people who have 15 plus years of working in IT and they say they were senior engineers novell after working in IT for 3 years and now after 8 more years when they had 12 years of IT experience they had to take a step back and go bback to a mid level engineer role as a windows engineer
cause novell was not in demand,
what do you guys think

also how are the cobol programmers doing now? For you specalists arent yall scared, also is it bad to specalise without being a generalist because if your specalisization dies what will you do? its not like if you were a senior lync specalist you could be a senior wintel engineer just cause you touched a windows server
please comment on your experience,
i being working in IT close to 5 years and what i leanred was IT is a marathon and not a sprint race and is a roller coaster you go up and down.

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Comments

AwesomeGarrett

The stories that you tell are the norm when it comes to the field of IT in general. If you do not keep your skills up to date and sharp, the industry will fly right over you.

Becoming an expert at a particular technology is not a career death sentence. Becoming an expert at particular technology, getting comfortable, and refusing to learn anything new is the death sentence.

professionale

Spot on

one of the mistakes I made,
once i got into IT i didnt upgrade my certications or continue to learn outside of working hours,
mind you i was working more than 40 hours, but luckly some of the companies i worked were good to give me good oppurtunities so i did not need to learn out side of working hours cause i was learning and growing rapidly during work hours.
Also if you are going to learn something learn something right and learn it, inside out before you go hopping into something else, dont try and juggle and try and learn a million things at once it will not help, plus learn something that is related to your job or something your passionate about.

AwesomeGarrett wrote: »

The stories that you tell are the norm when it comes to the field of IT in general. If you do not keep your skills up to date and sharp, the industry will fly right over you.

Becoming an expert at a particular technology is not a career death sentence. Becoming an expert at particular technology, getting comfortable, and refusing to learn anything new is the death sentence.

snunez889

professionale wrote: »

Spot on
.
Also if you are going to learn something learn something right and learn it, inside out before you go hopping into something else, dont try and juggle and try and learn a million things at once it will not help, plus learn something that is related to your job or something your passionate about.

I agree with 100%.. That was my issue for a long time and still kinda is.(school and trying to finish a cert on the side)

I plan to specialize at one point in my career, most likely after I finish school. Trying to juggle learning multiple things at the same time is some what a waste of time and energy. Once I finish this cert, I will only focus on school till I complete that.

techfiend

I've been told that if you want to make a lot of money in the IT field, find a niche that has some demand and master it, you have to enjoy it too. Novell is pretty much a distant memory but you might be surprised what cobol developers are making these days. It's low demand but so are up to date with it these days. I know a cobol developer that's just one pay tier down from the CTO.

You can either be comfortable with something that's pretty much guaranteed to be in demand like admin and engineering or venture into a hot technology at the time to make some big money but also lose job security. Sales has some of the best of both aforementioned but you have to want to travel and be persuasive.

I think being a master of none leaves a lot of money on the table but great to begin with to figure out what you really want to do.

professionale

yeah i mean now adays anyone can do anyones job

the quality is the question,
how many of you here say oh i go to work to learn everyday becaue they dont know anything, which is fine:)
but if u are going to take on a challenge dont just do it once or twice master it
it is not worth job hopping after you learn something and leave

when you job hop,
you dont do your career any justice and you do not do the company any justice as well,
sure you will make more money but are you really in IT for the money? find something else

techfiend

I think job hopping every year or two can be crucial in climbing the ladder early on in your career unless you are fortunate enough to get in with a company that's willing to promote you in a reasonable amount of time. True money shouldn't be top priority but for many getting going on any field it's a priority and often used for self motivation.

Nemowolf

Throwing in my two cents:

Touching on Novel ... If you have a skill set, you just need to find a market and that is true with even Novel. MANY public sectors, local or state, still use Novel because they don't have the resources to move into Windows or because they have legacy applications that keep them tied.

Cobol is not dead, it just left for a smoke break. As noted above, a well qualified and versed Cobol programmer for the right employer is a god send because not many people learn it with great skill to support (as noted) older applications.

Generalist vs Specialist ...

That should read, Entry level to Well seasoned Professional. When you are first starting out, you should be getting your feet wet with anything you can and diversify your skillset to ensure that you have highly available skills that will allow you to move from Helpdesk and Desktop Support roles to doing NOC Support and eventually more seasoned roles. I have seen highly specialized skills bring in 100k+ salaries far more often than anyone who is simply a generalist. Companies are moving away from keeping a few generalists to finding exceptionally qualified specialists because they can do far more with the same amount of time (or less).

(Example: You get a Cisco Engineer who has years of experience and they can troubleshoot issues with hardware and such in less than an hour while the Generalist might take all day. In the end, you save time by being more efficient and get a better return on your HR investment on a specialist.)

Ideally, again based on the number of years, you should find something that truly interests you and move toward learning as much as you can in that subject area to become the specialist. This will lead you to far better returns on your own time than staying a generalist.

Now something i will add is that getting Complimentary skills will also help you. For instance, if your company is lacking strong project management then learn as much as you can about it so you can start to leverage that vs others in your department.

professionale

I agree,
but staying a year in a company is not good
you have to at least do 1 year and 6 months minimum,
if you leave at a years mark or less you just used the company for your experience and your advantage and you did not help the company and you were a loss,
its not cool to use your company guys, respect it, its sure is better than staying at home
im just sick of these hoppers that hop in a year or less

techfiend wrote: »

I think job hopping every year or two can be crucial in climbing the ladder early on in your career unless you are fortunate enough to get in with a company that's willing to promote you in a reasonable amount of time. True money shouldn't be top priority but for many getting going on any field it's a priority and often used for self motivation.

dave330i

professionale wrote: »

I agree,
but staying a year in a company is not good
you have to at least do 1 year and 6 months minimum,
if you leave at a years mark or less you just used the company for your experience and your advantage and you did not help the company and you were a loss,
its not cool to use your company guys, respect it, its sure is better than staying at home
im just sick of these hoppers that hop in a year or less

No. A company hires you for its benefits, not yours. There's no obligation to work for a company for x amount of time. There may be consequences to job hopping, but if you're willing to accept the risk then you should leave when you believe it's the right time, rather than some arbitrary value.

cyberguypr

What? A year and 6 months? What kind of logic is that? Why would I stay at a place after I realize it's not a good fit? It could be 3 hours, 3 days, 3 months, or 3 years. If it doesn't work you simply move on. When companies make business decisions they have their interest as the number one priority, not yours. There's a flip side to that coin. If something comes your way that is definitely a great opportunity, are you going to say "no thanks, I need to spend a year and a half at my current job". Nonsense.

MeanDrunkR2D2

professionale wrote: »

I agree,
but staying a year in a company is not good
you have to at least do 1 year and 6 months minimum,
if you leave at a years mark or less you just used the company for your experience and your advantage and you did not help the company and you were a loss,
its not cool to use your company guys, respect it, its sure is better than staying at home
im just sick of these hoppers that hop in a year or less

I'm not really what one would call a "job hopper" by any means. But with my prior position, I knew that it was short term not long after I started there due to many lies told by the recruiting agency. I was there only for a warm body that could do busy work fast and efficiently. It wasn't furthering my career and honestly had I stayed any longer I would have become even more apathetic to the job I was doing. I left after 6 months when I found a much better position with a company that isn't jerking me around and I'm actually moving forward.

Now, if I had jumped frequently before 1 year or around that area, I'd have to explain that to potential employers and many would fear and not take a risk on someone who has worked for 6 companies in 5 years, or more. Now, there are times where it may happen, such as someone who only wants to work contracts and has many 1-6 month gigs that they complete and move onto the next. For some, that is great. Not really in my case, but to those who do, they enjoy the jumping around as they can get more exposure to different environments. Of course, those that excel in those cases are highly skilled and specialized in a certain technology and aren't usually cheap.

UnixGuy

cyberguypr wrote: »

What? A year and 6 months? What kind of logic is that? Why would I stay at a place after I realize it's not a good fit? It could be 3 hours, 3 days, 3 months, or 3 years. If it doesn't work you simply move on. When companies make business decisions they have their interest as the number one priority, not yours. There's a flip side to that coin. If something comes your way that is definitely a great opportunity, are you going to say "no thanks, I need to spend a year and a half at my current job". Nonsense.

This 1000+

Thanks for this post. I needed to hear that. I was one of those guys who thought 'I needed to spend x number of years before moving on - Bad idea.

nachodba

In my opinion, you should be a generalist to get to the point of knowing what you want to do. I was a general systems administrator for 3 to 5 years, and during that time, I was exposed to many different technologies. I went through a period of wanting to be an Exchange Administrator, then through a period of wanting to be a Network Engineer. Then one day I met SQL Server and I knew it was what I wanted to do for my career. I am now a DBA and I love the fact that I get called into the design meetings because of my experience as a Systems Administrator. I also like that I can call developers on any lies they try to give to push issues off onto the DB Server and help diagnose network issues, etc.