I have always been happy describing myself a “generalist” and so I have always really liked this Forbes article entitled “The Power of the Generalist – And How They’ll Rule the Future“. This was echoed by this HBR article, “All Hail the Generalist“. Both of these articles were published in summer 2012. A more recent post in the same vein would be HBR’s 2019 article, “Why Data Science Teams Need Generalists, Not Specialists“.
The increased popularity of an agile approach to both software development and project management in general may well have moved us on from a debate about “generalists” vs “specialists”, or not.
Agile approaches encourage people to have both broad and deep knowledge, to be T-shaped, or a “versatilist”. Teams comprising a diverse collection of these abilities may include generalists, taking an holistic overview, versatilists, translating the holistic into broad technology groups, and specialists, implementing and optimising the individual components.
The above Forbes article does not mention T-shaped versatilists. And if it was written today I suspect the title would be “The Power of the Versatilist – And How They’ll Rule the Future”. Although “versatilist” is a truly horrible word I do prefer it to “T-shaped”, as the “T”, taken quite literally, implies a single expertise, and that the “depth” and “breadth” are similar in scale.