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Comment on Ask HN: Why are you a generalist programmer?parent

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But that's based on the work you've seen, which is generalist work, which is what you're known for, which is what you've worked on; it's a circular definition. If the company has a database on their backend and they've built indexes and scaled it up and denormed it and sharded it and exhausted all the available options, but it's still not fast enough, would they call you to invent a new, faster database with properties X, Y, and Z that's needed for this particular site because everything on the shelf is the wrong shape, or would they pull in a specialist who's resume is exclusively that kind of work, which is why you've not seen more than 10% of that sort of stuff?

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