Hiring in the US is mostly skill based. Employers want someone who has done that specific job before. In contrast, I’ve long been a strong believer that hiring smart people is better than hiring for specific skills. In short, specialists versus generalists. In this blog post I explore these positions and when each makes sense.

The Case for Hiring a Specialist

“Experience required” is a common, if not ubiquitous, phrase seen in job postings. As has been pointed out many times, this is a catch-22 because there is no way to acquire experience if all potential employers require that you already have it.

The argument for only hiring people who are already experienced, or even experts, is the belief that to be effective many jobs, especially white-collar jobs, require years of extensive schooling and experience. For example, if someone needs surgery, most people will prefer a surgeon who has done that surgery many times before. Likewise, they’d want an experienced lawyer who has dealt with cases like theirs and understands the ins and outs. We want to be confident that someone we hire can do the job. We figure, if they’ve done this well before they should be able to do it again.

In programming, it’s common to have to go back and redo, also called “refactor”, large pieces of code. This can be for many reasons, but most often reflects a major shift in how the software is built. For instance, an accounting system adding payroll features might need major changes to some of its existing code. Refactoring code is much easier to do than creating the code in the first place because many of the difficulties were worked through the first time.

An example of this is changing your car’s headlights. In most cars, changing headlights is a simple affair once you know how that particular make and model of car works. The first time you attempt it, changing the headlight might take you a half hour of reading the manual, finding which bolts to loosen, etc.. After you’ve done it once and understand how everything works from end-to-end, the next attempt might take five minutes. Like changing headlights, with programming, and most other things, the more you do something the better you get at it.

Malcolm Gladwell talks about how mastery of a subject takes 10,000 hours of practice. In many cases, you need an expert. For example, if you are translating an important document from German and it must be exactly right, you want an expert German speaker to do the work.

In many cases, the goals and the skills needed are clear cut. A German document is best translated by a German speaker and surgery is best done by a surgeon with much experience.

But what if the goals and the skills aren’t so clear cut? What then? And can the faith in expertise be taken too far?

The Case for Hiring a Person with Breadth of Knowledge

What about work that is less well defined? Let’s say that instead of having a specific work in German that you need translated, you have a work that’s in some unknown language. For this, you’d be better off with someone who knows something about many different languages. Once they figure out what language it’s in, they might still need to send you to a specialist, but starting with a generalist is the way to go.

This is why, when you first go to see a doctor, you typically go to a General Practitioner who knows a bit about everything but doesn’t have in-depth knowledge about every medical topic. They see so many problems of so many different sorts, that they can usually fix your problem, or else they send you to a specialist. The important thing is that they know enough to know which specialist to send you to. And it doesn’t stop there. The specialist might send you to an even more specialized specialist.

For example, you might go to your doctor about headaches. She might send you to a neurologist who recognizes that your inner ear is part of the problem, and therefore sends you to an Otoneurologist — a neurologist specializing in ear issues.  

Generalists also excel at most creative activities, and I include coding new products as creative work. When the path forward isn’t set, people with a wide breadth of knowledge tend to be better at figuring out the direction to go.

This is because specialists tend to be more focused on specifics they know. It’s the old ‘a person with a hammer sees everything as a nail’ problem. In computer terms, a specialist in Unix, an operating system ubiquitous in back-end business systems, will tend to recommend using Unix. That’s because it’s what they know.  In contrast, a generalist who has used many different operating systems will have a better idea of the strengths and weaknesses of each system and be in a better position to make a recommendation that best fits the needs of the project at hand.

In my experience, the difficulty specialists often have with situations outside their realm of expertise is especially pronounced in management. Managers tend to operate based on management styles they’ve seen in the past. I’ve seen many managers from top-down command and control style organizations struggle with organizations that are flatter and more agile. They are used to stricter control systems and don’t understand the benefits of a more bottom-up agile structure. Managers who prefer bottom-up agile management do no better when thrust into a top-down culture where staff expect to be commanded and are often uncomfortable with being able to make their own decisions.

T-Shaped People

A special case is T-shaped people: people with a deep specialty but who also have a wide breadth of experience. An example would be an Otolaryngologist (ear, nose and throat doctor) who also has good amount of expertise across many areas of medicine. In fact, our medical education system tries to make sure doctors are T-shaped by having young doctors go on ‘rotation’ to different departments for a few months to learn other areas of medicine.

My experience is that T-shaped people tend to be passionate about the general topic, learning everything they can about the specific topic and the things surrounding it. In computer programming, I see this as the difference between those for who programming is a job and those for who it is a calling; something they would do whether paid for it or not. The time and energy it takes to be both a specialist and a generalist in a topic is intense, and I find that only those who do it for the love of doing it can put in the time needed. Forty hours a week just isn’t enough to master a topic and have a solid understanding of surrounding topics. It takes someone willing to put in much more time than that.

This is the problem with T-shaped people, they are extremely rare. They also tend to be accomplished in their field based on their knowledge and dedication, meaning that hiring them is an expensive proposition. If you can find one and afford them, they do make great employees and partners.

M-Shaped People

If T-shaped people are rare, M-shaped people are unicorns: exceptionally rare. Being someone who can talk medicine fluently and then play Beethoven’s Hammerklavier piano sonata at Carnegie Hall is rare indeed.

I have a wide network of amazing and smart people, but only one person I consider M-shaped. He’s far too accomplished to ever get him to work for me, but he’s always a joy to talk to. We discuss everything from Korean sitcoms, to opera, to the latest advances in artificial intelligence. He is a true Renaissance Man.

The Right Person for the Right Job

My experience is that most corporations are far too hung up on hiring specialists. They want someone who has done that exact job before and been very successful at it. The tendency is to think of companies as complex machines with cogs and gears, where if a cog or gear breaks it must be replaced by an exact duplicate or else the entire machine will malfunction.

There are certainly companies and positions where this is true. However, in a rapidly changing technological and business environment, adaptability and a broad skill set are often more valuable than highly specialized knowledge. Companies that focus more on learning and encouraging their employees to develop both depth and breadth of skills are likely to be more competitive in the long run.

I used to have a rule that I wouldn’t hire a programmer who didn’t do programming on their own. To me it would be like hiring someone to create crossword puzzles who didn’t solve crosswords for fun themselves. Eventually, I had to relax this rule as there are a surprising number of programmers who only see it as “work” and don’t do it on the side. I can say without fear of contradiction that the best programmers I ever hired all shared one characteristic, they loved programming and did programming unrelated to work for the fun of it.

In conclusion, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to whether specialists or generalists are better. It depends on the specific needs of the position and the overall goals of the organization. If you can find and afford T-shaped or M-shaped individuals, they will give you a tremendous competitive edge, fostering a dynamic and adaptable workforce capable of meeting the challenges of tomorrow. If you can’t find T-shaped people, then a mix of deep expertise and broad knowledge, weighted toward broad knowledge, will help companies succeed in a complex world.