Is it okay to be generalist?

Posted by Londoner on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Londoner
Published on 2011-01-17T00:32:22Z Indexed on 2011/01/17 0:59 UTC
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career-development

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work-environment

I work at a ~50 employee company (UK), where all the technical people do a bit of everything. Specialising in anything for very long (6 months) is discouraged. For example, last week, I built a new Debian webserver, refactored some Perl, sat on a sales phone call, did a tape backup, reviewed code, built and deployed an RPM, gave opinions about x, y, z...

With such a work scheme, I have gained a general knowledge how many things work, and pretty specific knowledge. I maybe program for 5 hours a week, despite officially being a developer.

Does anyone else work like this, (or is this company unique)?

Is it a problem to have skills developed in this way? (i.e. know a bit about everything in a certain domain, rather than know everything about say, one programming language?)

Is it okay to be a generalist?

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