Musings on my own career
I am an IT generalist. Geek of all trades. Ever since I was a young child it was impressed upon me the importance of being a generalist and never specializing. The argument is that though the specialist always makes more money, they become pigeon holed to the point that if their specialty dries up they are completely sunk, type casted into a job description they cannot escape from.
The world of Information Technology (or "working with computers" for all you non-geeks) as an ocean of work that is as vast as it is deep. I have sailed the surface of most of it. Arguably the only parts of the sea I haven't sailed fully are programing and networking, though I can snoop around code and I can set up a home network, I have never worked doing either.
I have taken classes in deeper topics but would never test because certifications lead to being defined by those very pieces of paper, and I don't want to be defined by a certificate in a filing cabinet.
I am proud of being nimble and capable of picking up new and different things quickly. My problem is that I am about to run into a whole mess of sargassum and my best chance is to either dive under it by specializing, or leaving the pond entirely and getting into a different industry entirely. Both have their merits, but I'm leaning towards specialization. The money is way better than starting something else, and if the work dries up, I can always find a new non-IT ocean to dive in somewhere else.
Its a paradigm shift for me, but one I'm not too scared of. Its not the deep water that scares me, its the fact that I will be farther from the sky.
