Being average at many things allows you to communicate with the wide range of people who are also average at one of those things. For a startup founder, that kind of domain knowledge can be extremely useful.

IMHO, highly specific expertise is overvalued by young people. Academia is the only place where specialization really shines; everywhere else you need to get along with people who don't understand your field.

>IMHO, highly specific expertise is overvalued by young people. Academia is the only place where specialization really shines; everywhere else you need to get along with people who don't understand your field.

really? from what I've seen of the Engineering field, there is rather a lot of tolerance for people who can't communicate with 'normal people'

My experience as a business owner has been that yeah, dealing with people outside your field is the hard part. Sure, if I had a better understanding of law, that'd be great. I'd be able to better choose lawyers.

But would I choose that better understanding of law at the expense of Engineering experience? hell no. I've set up my business so that as long as I don't make completely abysmal legal decisions, my legal decisions won't matter all that much. There aren't any weird legal twists to my business plan. As long as I can avoid getting sued into oblivion, my lawyer is doing what I want him to do.

But even a relatively small difference in the skills of the engineers I can hire for the amount I'm paying can make a huge difference, and at this point, I'm pretty much counting on my ability to spot 'diamonds in the rough' - last week a mistake made by both myself and an employee (the mistake was that it took us 8 hours to spot a problem that we should have seen in 30 mins) cost us north of ten grand in SLA credits. If I was just a little bit better (or had just a little bit more sleep) we'd have saved the SLA credits /and/ we would have saved a pretty big bruise to our reputation.

Obviously, choosing a different business model would have required that i could identify and economically purchase other skillsets; but there really is no getting around the 'It takes one to know one' principle. If you run a business, you better be good at the core things that the business needs to be good at. For me, this is why I chose the business I chose, and why I chose to bootstrap rather than run with investors.

It means you are last likely to be in a situation where you are completely stumped, and more likely to be able to find and recognize the talent in those you are outsourcing stuff too.

Furthermore, a lot of skill sets transfer over easily to related skill sets. It can help you get better at the areas where you are already strong, by pointing out specific aspects in them that you may have been overlooking.

shrugs I've usually been too much of a generalist, so I'm currently trying to specialize a bit more. Your mileage may vary.

Another advantage to breadth is that you can recognize when another field's tools might be a better fit for your current problem.

Being a pure generalist probably sticks you to the initial triage role (which is no fun), but having a very large number of baseline competencies is handy.

I'm not saying it's not handy. It's great to be good at a lot of things.

My point is just that some people learn certain subjects faster than they learn other subjects. my thought is that if it takes the same effort to learn a little in an area where you are bad as to learn a lot in an area where you are good, and you have a limited amount of effort to apply, you are better off applying that effort to the area where you are good.

I'd say that is VERY situational. If the area you're bad at is, for an extreme example, 'managing to complete tasks you start', and something you're good at is 'eating Cheetos really quickly', then you can see where it would make sense to reinforce the bad before bothering to work on the good, just because it's easier.

You have a good point. some skills are more monitizable than others, and some skills are almost required for your other skills to be useful.

I'm actually one of those people who has had a hard time 'managing to complete tasks you start' (and while i still have that problem sometimes, I think i have accomplished more than the average bear.) - now, I do fight that directly some; you are right, it's too much in the way of everything else for me to ignore it because it's hard, like handwriting. They make some /really effective/ drugs for that these days, amongst other things, but as for 'hacks' to avoid that weakness? becoming a SysAdmin is one. If you can perform well in emergency situations, where you /can't/ drop things on the floor, lots of half-finished projects get forgiven. (and really, in SysAdmin work, if you don't take care of something when it's not an emergency, you take care of it when it /is/) I mean, it's bad to not complete things in non-emergency situations, maybe even worse than being a less productive programmer. But if you can 'hero' it out, even if that is the sub-optimal solution, you usually don't get fired for it. Management forgets that you only notice your sysadmin if he's not doing his job.

But, I find even the threat of an emergency motivates me to fix things, so I don't think add sysadmins need to remain in the less-useful 'hero' role forever... but being a sysadmin does mean that our failure mode usually doesn't get us fired.

If you can manage to hold down a job long enough to get some good experience, hiring other people can also be a way to get around this. I can start something and have someone else come along and clean up behind me. Also, just working with other people, I find, helps keep me on task.

but really, if I didn't have a skill that was relatively hard to find, well, for most of my life, I'd have had a hard time holding down a job at McDonalds. Nobody is going to deal with a fry cook who keeps Engineering hours.

I think the crux of the matter is that there are so many things to be good at. Most people aren't any good at most things, so if you put a little effort it then you can be better than average even if you're not particularly talented in that arena.

Speaking of talent, another important point is that talent is overrated. You never know when you will break through from being average to good or great. People who write themselves off saying "I'm just not good at that" will never have the chance. The effort that the greats have put it in is always hidden to us.

So my advice is if you enjoy something don't worry too much about sucking it at.