There’s an old joke. It goes:
A specialist is somebody that knows more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing.
A generalist is somebody that knows less and less about more and more until they know nothing about everything.
Like most good jokes there’s a grain of truth to it. But joking aside why is an “experienced generalist” somebody you want hunting down a fault for you?
In most organisations employees are tasked with a particular aspect of a complex system, for example:
- your developers are dealing with a set of APIs – in the Java world this might be Hibernate, Spring, or an Apache connection pooling library
- your system administrators are dealing with rolling out code – often to development environments first and then production environments
- your virtual machine team is dealing with creating and destroying virtual machines – as requested by the project and managing resource utilisation
- your devops team is dealing with another set of APIs – be they cloud related or managing the installation and upgrade of physical hardware your company owns
Each of these is often focused on their particular area of expertise and responsibility. And as much as one might try and refrain it is all to easy to blame another team when something goes wrong.
A generalist may not know the specific APIs your team is using. They may not know the specific limits of your hardware. But they’ve been around long enough to build up the skills to find out what needs focus.
That generalist will then pour through documentation and other material available to match recognised symptoms with potential problems – then hone in to eliminate potential areas of trouble.
The generalist will discount nothing! And they do not need to defend a specific aspect of a system. They are free to consider all the possibilities. And sometimes the results are quite surprising! But they are stories for a different day.