… and you, Marcus, you have given me many things; now I shall give you this good advice. Be many people. Give up the game of being always Marcus Cocoza. You have worried too much about Marcus Cocoza, so that you have been really his slave and prisoner. You have not done anything without first considering how it would affect Marcus Cocoza’s happiness and prestige. You were always much afraid that Marcus might do a stupid thing, or be bored. What would it really have mattered? All over the world people are doing stupid things … I should like you to be easy, your little heart to be light again. You must from now, be more than one, many people, as many as you can think of … ”
– Karen Blixen (” The Dreamers” from “Seven Gothic Tales”)
I had a talk with a friend before, about being Jack of all trades, master of none. I guess, my blogging here is just an extension to the discussion, that I simply had to forgo during my talk with him. Our talk started after I question him on his motive to study math. No, not as in taking up math course in university. But, as an adult, who wanted to study math purely for self-interest among many other things i.e. politics, technology, religion, science, history etc. He claimed to be Jack of all trades, master of none, unlike me who chose to specialise in technology and software engineering. At the end of the talk, we both concluded that each person chooses whatever that suits him most.
Note : It was a friendly chat. We were not arguing, were not even debating anything.
Actually I had been a ‘generalist’ before (cant afford to write JOATMON all the time). During the earlier years of my secondary school era, I played a lot of sports, but did not make into any team because I didn’t want to commit to any training schedule. I had also probably attended the first session of most health/martial art practices including silat, taekwondo, kickboxing, boxing, kendo, yoga etc. I had also made trivial programming in numerous number of programming languages i.e. Pascal, Delphi, C, C++, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, C#, Java and assemblies. And let’s not forget human languages, I had also been in formal classes for Malay, English, Chinese and Arabic , and also had pathetic attempts at Japanese, Korean and French. Strategic board games? I play them all except backgammon.
Okay, I risk being called show off. Actually it’s just a little retaliation. I felt that being called a specialist had invalidated my life and every kind of person I was before.
However at the moment, I am not so much a generalist. It is too hard to derive tangible benefits from being one. Despite the above may sound impressive, I was a nobody in MCKK among my friends who were school representatives for football, rugby, basketball or hockey. I failed job interview at ARM Limited, Cambridge because I couldn’t exhibit mastery of ARM architecture and the assembly instructions. And I did not know how to swap values of two variables in C without a temporary storage ( I still don’t know how ). Keeping up with new technologies had costed me a lot of time and money, but until now I still have no confidence to take up freelance job. And all those extra languages I learned? .. it’s as if I had never !!
Having said that, there are advantages of being a generalist. In a large corporation, a generalist is more likely to be promoted to higher management level instead of their specialist counterparts. That is similar for politics too, I would think. Being a generalist helps to draft vision and gameplan, especially with the supports from the specialists. I have heard advice to switch job every 2 years from someone within our organization. Well, that depends on what you want to achieve. In terms of improving skills, that is ridiculous, but in terms of knowing as many people as you can, that is excellent. And the latter is usually what helps you to climb the corporate ladder, sadly. 😦
Should I be a generalist or a specialist? The question is not really critical to be answered now, although in the limited career-wise context it may be. I however prefer to heed the quote at the top, to be more than one, many people, as many as I can think of.
interesting problem bout swapping values without additional storage.. does this count?
a=2, b=3;
a=axb (a is now 6, b is still 3);
b=a/b (a is 6, b is now 2);
a=a/b (a is now 3, b=2);
can do additions/substractions too
hmm i guess that could work. nice..
and i thought it was about some obscure C programming language feature that he was testing me on. Some advanced pointer stuff.
brilliant..
can I say, in my defense, i was worried about division by zero, or signed vs unsigned for additions/substractions. Haha 🙂
nice – i like being a generalist la…thats why im finding it hard to do a phd…
hard isnt it?
i like being generalist as well.., i get bored too easily to focus on just one thing