Recently came across a video and a couple blog posts talking about the “T” shaped generalist, especially in SWE contexts. While their assessment of what it is is mostly correct, it puts me off that they think, or at least make their viewers think, that they can become one if they just choose to focus on several areas of knowledge. This is just flat out wrong. People won’t just choose to deepen their knowledge in different domains just because, that doesn’t happen.

The “T” shaped generalist thing can be reduced to two parts, I’ll be quite literal here, the top-horizontal part of the “T” and the bottom “I” shaped part of the “T”. Let’s start from the bottom. This part really just means “are you smart enough to go very deep in a given domain?”, if yes, then congratulations, you have your bottom part of the “T” already, that’s it, nothing more to it. Now the top one is a bit trickier, this is the “generalist” part, and this is entirely a consequence of being a high agency individual.

Take someone trying to put out an EP. They aren’t “choosing” to become a sound engineer or a graphic designer or a social media guy. They just need the record to sound good and the cover to look right. If they have to learn to comp vocals, mix tracks, and market to vlogs just to get the result, they do it. Same for shipping an app, you don’t learn devops because you love configuring VPSs and routing the firewall to LOTR content, you learn because your site isn’t live until you do.

These are people who focus on an outcome and treat domain-hopping as a necessary friction. You dive just deep enough at each roadblock to clear it, then move on. You become a generalist because you refuse to let a lack of knowledge stop you from getting it done. You don’t really get to choose.