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Check out Guitar George, he knows all the chords
Mind, it's strictly rhythm; he doesn't wanna' make it cry or sing
Yes an old guitar is all he can afford
When he gets up under the lights to play his thing
...
We are the Sultans, We are the Sultans of Swing
Dire Straits, Sultans of Swing (1978)
A staple of classic-rock stations, Dire Straits' Sultans of Swing has this wonderful interplay between the amateurs and the experts. The song's story is set in a jazz bar, with Dire Straits laying down the music and painting themselves as the bar's titular jazz-and-more house band. Their own musical expertise is undeniable, filled with warm harmonies, smooth transitions and an ever-changing series of musical movements.
But the house band at the centre of the story does not hog all the mic time; they let others have turns, like the decidedly more amateur Guitar George.
Beyond being professionals, the musicians in Dire Straits are also clearly specialists in their instrument. Whatever their more generalist music skills, they have a deep affinity and understanding of their instrument, making the guitar sing, or jazzing the sound with a wonderful mix of percussion rhythms.
In technology, there are of course experts and amateurs; professionals and hobbyists. I want to focus strictly on the professionals, those of us who make our living playing the Tech game.
Within the ranks of the professionals, the experts, those of us who have spent decades working in the field, our expertise can go in several directions. but the distinction between the Generalist and the Specialist in particular has always fascinated me.
Let me put my cards on the table: I am, and always have been, a Generalist.
Sure, I have long, extensive and somewhat deep experience in some technologies. Most notable would be decades of hands-on work with relational databases and object-oriented programming languages.
But my personal wiring is to go broad rather than to go deep. I see that pattern of choosing breadth over depth repeating itself in many different ways throughout my life. Many times I have honed a new skill to an intermediate level before then moving on to growing my next skill in another area of interest.
One example, echoing Guitar George, is that I learned and enjoy playing acoustic guitar, including "all the chords." I advanced enough to have moderate ability with bar chords, enough that I can appreciate the chord progression in "Sultans of Swing" and how brilliantly simple it is to move through the progression using bar chords. I can appreciate the master who came up with that.
But I never wanted to learn to make my guitar "cry or sing." Or even gain the level of instrument mastery of the Dire Straits musicians.
Instead, I find myself drawn to my next instrument - should I pick up the bass guitar, a reasonably small lateral step from my acoustic? or should I switch to learning drums and deepening my understanding of rhythms and song structures?
I also am an ordained priest in the Anglican Church of Canada. While spiritual leadership is now just my side-gig on evenings and weekends, I remember how, as a parish priest, my responsibilities demanded a real breadth of skills, interests and abilities. Preparing for and leading a Sunday service demands a whole different mindset than hospital visitations or setting vision or leading business meetings, but all were needed in parish ministry work.
In my tech career, the first time I felt the tension between going deeper into a Specialist role or broader into a Generalist role was while working for a small, niche consulting company. I was fairly new in the industry, just a handful of years of work experience. My boss pushed hard for me to apprentice under our senior architect. It was early in the E-Commerce world and there was huge demand for people with expertise who could lead projects for our clients. I wanted to grow more as a Team Lead and learn about managing people and projects.
Years later, when looking to enhance my Senior Developer credibility, I considered raising my Stack Overflow score as a way of proving my tech expertise chops. But others, with a deeper, more specialized knowledge of a given tech stack were always faster and more accurate in their responses.
The crux in my personal development has always been that the deeper I go in a given skill, whether in tech, music, or other, the more quickly I become bored and start to look for something else, something new, to learn.
I have always wanted to grow horizontally rather than vertically.
That is why I have had so much fun and success in my years as a Software Development / Engineering Manager. It is the most perfect mix I have found in tech for balancing my desired level of depth with a lot of breadth. It lets me surround myself with subject matter experts, people on whom I can rely and foster their specializations, while moving through my more general list of responsibilities: design leadership; coaching; planning; communicating up, down and laterally on the org chart; dealing with personalities and so much more.
A Generalist in tech, such as an engineering manager, needs a deep enough foundation in the core technologies, concepts, business goals and more. They are at their best when they know where the limits are in their understanding and are not afraid to go into a team meeting and be the one in the room with the least knowledge, but also with the ability to grasp the details quickly enough to then be the voice of the team's challenges and decisions to others.
A Specialist in tech can solve hard problems with a speed, efficiency, confidence and accuracy. They use their deep understanding of the technologies, the problem domain, the evolution of their components and modules, to push through barriers that might stymie lesser mortals.
In the coming series of meditations, I want to reflect on the Generalist, the Specialist, how and when each is most critical to a team or a company, how to manage them, and how Artificial Intelligence changes, or at least affects, the game.
Won't you join me? It promises to be a lot of fun.
But for now, "Good night, now it's time to go home ... We are the Sultans of Swing."