Specialization, Money and Responsibility
Posted by Gavin Doughtie Sat, 17 Dec 2005 05:36:00 GMT
I’ll be 43 this Sunday. I write code every day. C++ Linux graphics code in the daytime, Ruby on Rails AJAX stuff at night.
Here’s what I think. Guys my age have mortgages and children. We need to earn at the higher end of our capacity. For some guys that means moving into management (for organizations that value management over engineering). For some it means developing ever more arcane specializations.
If you’re a twentysomething IT developer, you aren’t even going to see us specialized guys. We’re busy with problems that involve domain knowledge you’ve never needed to learn, fiddly weird hardware, languages that are too low-level, or too high-level to be part of mainstream curricula and entry-level jobs.
I ran a great number of developer interviews at one of the start-ups I worked at a few years ago. Almost all the candidates, young and old, were duds—but sometimes some graybeard engineer would show up and just floor us with his knowledge and understanding. Inevitably, he’d get a better offer, and vanish again into the rarified realms from which he descended.
I don’t think age is the issue. Value is. If you keep learning and remain valuable, there will be opportunity.
Did the greybeards impress with deep domain knowledge or by just being to pick up any old thing and run with it? My understanding has always been that breadth rather than depth is the way to get gigs. Your post makes me wonder, however, if that's just how you get any old gig, and the specialized route is the way to get *good* gigs. (aside: I originally wrote "*goog* gigs" there. Freudian typo?)
I think a career is about maintaining enough breadth in your abilities to move from position to position in an upward direction -- the more possibilities available, the better you can manage where you go. I think specialization is where folks can realize the largest dollar amounts per hour of time sold. My personal tendency has been to specialize where I have to and generalize when I can. I basically spent the first half of the nineties as a consultant because my specialized skills (4th Dimension development) paid so much more than I could make with my generalized skills ("computer stuff"). I eventually had to take a pretty significant cash-flow hit to transition into an environment that would help develop my general skills (general-purpose OO programming).