or: the hidden costs of trying to excel in being a generalist.
See, not long ago, just a few decades, those of us that could succeed in the market, were required to do one thing, and one thing well. That’s probably where the saying of: “You had only ONE JOB!” came from. Well, that’s my assumption anyways.
People were recognized by being specialists, they did their stuff well, got evermore keen and precise into the duties they were performing, and that was okay for a living. Well, not we kinda have it backwards, or even sidewards I guess, where it is expected of us (in the IT field) to be masters of all sorts of crafts.
Pick a ‘simple’ DevOps role for example, where you are required to have knowledge over: linux, networking, virtualization, docker, kubernetes, cloud platforms, at least one cloud provider, if not more (AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, you name it), knowledge of CI/CD (github actions, Azure DevOps, BitBucket, Jenkins), observability (Grafana, Prometheus, Datadog, Dynatrace), testing (inside pipelines), and I could go on and on naming all the different utilities required for a “job” right now.
Don’t get me wrong, I love what I do. But gosh, I just HATE that we have to keep juggling our time in order to be “on par” with demand and the job market, even more now with AI delivery tools and the like where every new week something new pops out into the wild.
And that’s where I guess the trouble starts spreading in generalist town. It is required too much of one single brain to process, and now with evermore multi-tasking going on, it is no surprise that burnout is rising. We are expected to excel in multiple fields, but then, we really become “Masters of None”.
Maybe that is a skill issue and a sort of technical debt on MY persona, rather than an illness affecting this whole industry but… I guess that’s not really like what all those LinkedIn posts and memes show about the current condition.
Everyone seems saturated, and the entry-level to get a job nowadays seems, to say the least, unreaching. I was lucky enough to get a job where I could gradually progress and people were patient and kind enough with me, but then, lately, it really is starting to feel more interesting to just buy some farmland and rent a few goats and be there in the middle of godly mother nature and touch grass for a while.
Gosh, does all of this really pays off? Is it really worth it all the grind? For what? Industry recognizement? To do what then? Maybe I fell for the illusion of recognition of one’s hard work.
I guess Chaplin was right… we do live in modern times.
fuck.