We hire specialists. Deep knowledge in one field, not many skills in all the others. We value and celebrate specialists with promising career paths, titles, and promotions.

The fabled “T-shaped employee” is an outgrowth of this. Minimal capabilities across the board and massive skills in one field. The definition of a specialist.

They’ve even come up with a “Comb-shaped employee.” Someone who is a specialist in several fields. But still, a multi-faceted specialist.

But what about those of us who eschew these shapes altogether? Can generalists exist in a world of such intricate and complex work requirements?

As a specialist-turned-generalist, I say, ”yes!”

I used to be a proud software developer, then fell into entrepreneurship, then writing, and now I run a media business, wearing a few dozen hats.

The person who made me realize this is Milly Tamati, a staunch defender and empoweress of generalists all over the world. I chatted with Milly about the employability of people who don’t fit into a category, why generalists are the puzzle pieces that allow organizations to destroy knowledge silos, and how incredibly powerful a community of generalists can be.

Join me on The Bootstrapped Founder this week as I talk to Milly Tamati about The Generalists’ World.​

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Signals

Vercel, the popular “frontend cloud” add development and hosting platform, had a bit of a social incident: an employee seems to have abused their internal data access to threaten an indie hacker over a side project that the employee didn’t like. At the same time, Vercel copies successful indie projects into Vercel templates, much to the chagrin of the software founder community.

Both of these discussions happening at the same time made Vercel the main character of software Twitter for a day and caused them to reach out to the people who made waves. It looks like the offender was fired, the template marketplace is under review, and Vercel leadership is open to feedback. Crisis averted.

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Someone reverse-engineered the “system prompts” used by ChatGPT — the instructions the AI gets from OpenAI so that it knows what kinds of answers to give and what to censor. The fun part, besides understanding just how generic all of this is, is how the person who found these convinced the AI to hand over the prompts: they “shamed” ChatGPT into revealing this information. So, it’s more social engineering than anything else. Hacking AI has become something that scammers and con artists should be very good at — what a bizarre twist.

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My friend and podcast guest Jay Clouse very recently released an episode of Creator Science with Jenny Hoyos about YouTube shorts. Even if you’re not a YouTube creator, this will be interesting: Jenny talks about the basic psychodynamics that make short-form content succeed or fail. You’ll be able to use this in your Tweets, your emails, even conversations in the future. Do check it out — the video is well on its way to getting to 400,000 views and beyond.

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