I am also a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. It's not that you won't get hired. It's that you won't get a nice salary, as you will have 'junior'-level skills for any field you apply for.
There are some positions where this obviously does work in your favour, but in general, you can be a junior in a bunch of jobs rather than a senior in one.
The point was that current interview processes have no mechanism for measuring the second sort of individual. They don't have a way to measure tenacity and the uncanny knack of discovering the best way to do something when starting from ignorance(1).
tl;dr: A Google-like company would not have hired (someone like) Woz.
(1) Its double-hard because there are no shortage of people with tenacity who have the knack for doing things in a terrible way over and over. They all think they're in the former category.
I actually think this is the solution. Nothing would be more impressive than a python project that started out as a "c++ witten in python" project that barely worked but then evolved into a well managed project full of best practices in a matter of weeks.
I'd hire that person to do nearly anything. Sadly, not many interview processes are hip to github yet.
There are good companies that will hire people like us. Just keep searching. Hint: they are not startups, but boring, regular (but stable!) companies in boring industries. But you can go crazy getting them up to date with awesome software because they appreciate someone who knows what they are doing.
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I completely agree with you, and I find myself in the 2nd camp.
I'm curious about why you say "You'll never hire one of the second kind"?
How does one of the second kind fit into the world as an employed developer? This is something I'm struggling with currently.
I am also a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. It's not that you won't get hired. It's that you won't get a nice salary, as you will have 'junior'-level skills for any field you apply for.
There are some positions where this obviously does work in your favour, but in general, you can be a junior in a bunch of jobs rather than a senior in one.
The point was that current interview processes have no mechanism for measuring the second sort of individual. They don't have a way to measure tenacity and the uncanny knack of discovering the best way to do something when starting from ignorance(1).
tl;dr: A Google-like company would not have hired (someone like) Woz.
(1) Its double-hard because there are no shortage of people with tenacity who have the knack for doing things in a terrible way over and over. They all think they're in the former category.
I find Github has helped with this problem a lot.
I actually think this is the solution. Nothing would be more impressive than a python project that started out as a "c++ witten in python" project that barely worked but then evolved into a well managed project full of best practices in a matter of weeks.
I'd hire that person to do nearly anything. Sadly, not many interview processes are hip to github yet.
There are good companies that will hire people like us. Just keep searching. Hint: they are not startups, but boring, regular (but stable!) companies in boring industries. But you can go crazy getting them up to date with awesome software because they appreciate someone who knows what they are doing.