Be a generalist and flip the script.

Creative Boom has an interesting article on the rise of the creative generalist.

Because today, clients are asking more from fewer suppliers, timelines are compressed, and the creative industry itself is evolving faster than anyone anticipated. And when the entire motorway is under construction, lane discipline becomes less relevant than adaptability.

When I started, web designers needed to understand the client and customer needs, design a solution, build the frontend code, work with developers to implement it and then test and evolve that solution over time.

While there are distinct advantages to specialization, understanding all of the pieces seems valuable when companies are jumping to automate and eliminate job roles.

It's big news when companies cut jobs in favor of AI. On the flip side, I'm wondering if one knowledgable independent contractor will be able to do what that big company does - only better and for less.

Dan Shipper from Every puts it this way:

Being a generalist gives us something that language models don’t have: the capacity to learn quickly, and to see and solve novel problems in new domains. In an allocation economy, the person who wins isn’t the expert who knows the exact answer to a question. It’s the one who knows which questions to ask in the first place.

Also, this comic by Penny Arcade.