Worth Reading: Expert Generalists
Martin Fowler published an interesting article about Expert Generalists. Straight from the abstract:
As computer systems get more sophisticated we’ve seen a growing trend to value deep specialists. But we’ve found that our most effective colleagues have a skill in spanning many specialties.
Also:
There are two sides to real expertise. The first is the familiar depth: a detailed command of one domain’s inner workings. The second, crucial in our fast-moving field is the ability to learn quickly, spot the fundamentals that run beneath shifting tools and trends, and apply them wherever we land.
Remember how I told you to focus on the fundamentals? 😎
I've been pretty hesitant to post what I think about this. Uncle Bob is very wrong about this. For he cannot recognize a generalist. It's a small wonder, he is wrong in my opinion about shitloads of things, especially programming. But here it goes anyway. Let my people go surfing!
tldr: a generalist is someone who can easily see constrains to an interdisciplinary problem. Not someone who sees the same crap in C and Python and Java.
Uncle Bob is unable to recognize the value of a generalist. His value proposition is "can we fit a Python developer as a valued member of Java team ? "
Of course you can. But unfortunately languages which you can talk, or have the ability to learn, do not define a generalist. Languages are just a mean of expression. They are largely irrelevant for how you think. Also largely irrelevant of domain specific knowledge you carry with you. And also, largely irrelevant (but weakly correlated ) to an individual's curiosity.
Shoehorning a Python dev into Java, it's not an attempt to use generalist, but to "specialize" a guy who can express his thoughts in Python to do the same in Java.
A generalist imo, is someone with enough knowledge of related domains to clearly define the constrains on a interdisciplinary problem Someone who will prevent you from building on RFC 1149 to have encrypted transport between sites 15 km apart. if you will, he is the engineer from Jules Verne's novels, or Bertrand's Russell's polymaths. But no, not uncles Bob vision. he just shoehorns, instead of using the best characteristics of those people. What a waste.
Oh well, it seems this guy is not Uncle Bob, so sctatch the part with the "wrong about programming". I do not know what this other Martin gentleman says about programming.