The age of the generalist is finally here

I’ve always been a jack of all trades, master of none, and I am proud of it.

It helped me everywhere I worked. If something needed to be done, I could usually do it, or figure it out fast. Put up a server, write a script, set up Jenkins, run a model, do some feature engineering, help with product work, even fill in on UX when needed, and this was back when Photoshop was the UX tool of choice. I never cared about the area of work. When there was something that needed to be done, I did it.

But for years being a generalist was a liability when it came to getting hired.

Recruiters never saw it as an advantage. They saw it as a lack of focus. You don’t know Java. You’ve never been only a PM. You don’t have X years in this exact language. We need specialists!

That never made much sense to me, because the value I brought was that I was a generalist. I could move between functions, connect dots, and pick things up fast. But the market wanted neat boxes, so I learned to tailor my CV to emphasize my specialization in fraud prevention, even though that was never the full story.

Ironically, even there, the thing that made me most useful was being a generalist. When I built a fraud red team, the real value was never just fraud knowledge. It was knowing enough about security, fraud, and system design to see where abuse was actually possible.

Now AI coding has flipped it. The power is in being a generalist.

I use Claude Code constantly. Almost every night I open my laptop and build something. Part of that is just who I am. I have always loved technology for its own sake, playing with random tools and libraries in my free time and building things for fun. Turns out that habit is one of the strongest assets you can have right now.

In the past month alone, I built a tool to help me practice speaking slower, a system that turns coding sessions into a searchable proof-of-work portfolio, and now I’m working on a better NVR setup because I got tired of Blue Iris and Frigate was too painful to set up for normal people.

And through all of it, I am seeing that what matters is not that I am the world’s best engineer in any one stack. What matters is that I know enough across enough areas to direct the AI well.

I can tell it what should exist. What tools to use. What language makes sense. What structure is overkill. When it is making something too complicated. When it should use SQLite, Postgres, or NoSQL. And I can catch it when it starts going off script and doing things that don’t matter.

Being a generalist is suddenly a superpower.

The people who are going to win in this era are the ones who can move across disciplines, guide the AI, catch mistakes, and stay anchored to the customer problem they are actually trying to solve.

For years, being a jack of all trades was treated like a weakness. Something to apologize for. Something to hide.

Now it feels like exactly the opposite.

The generalist finally has a moment, and recruiting will need to catch up to that fact.