> But even if they spent serious time using a technology, they still need 4 hrs of work in it to look surface competent again (I think because they're constantly swapping knowledge in and out, vs a deep knowledge person who have practiced the same patterns over and over and over).
I've been doing professional software work for 25 years. The last several years I've been working with various JS toolkits (vue/angular, some react) as well as backend stuff (mostly PHP, some Node, some Java, some other stuff), and attendant tooling and whatnot (build systems, testing systems, etc). The last 6 months, I've found myself contracting on different projects swapping between these various stacks, sometimes multiple times per week. I know I look incompetent as a JS developer to some folks who are living in that world 40+ hrs/week for years on end. Couple the various tech stacks with each team's own styles of doing things - which, really, they each seem to think any deviation from 'their' standards is heretical and indicates you're a 'lesser' or 'less experienced' developer - it wears thin after a while..
Trying to 'showcase' that 'jack of all trades' aspect in interviews rarely seems to go well, unless it's not an interview and just a word-of-mouth referral from someone who already 'gets it'.
A thing I try to do in interviews is ask people to help me see their strengths... rather than trying to catch them out, I want to know which style of interview (there's so many....) will convince me of their strengths. Some styles of interview will face more of a an upward battle to be convincing to me, but I'm genuinely game to bend toward any format somebody wants.
e.g. Interviewing for a backend dev position but don't want to write any code/algos in the interview, and just talk past projects? OK, that's gonna be tougher sell, but I'm game if you think you can convince me of your strength down that road.
This makes me think about, in my case, if somebody were to offer the same interview freedom to me... As a strong senior generalist, how would I demonstrate that most definitively in 45 minutes? I haven't come up with an easy answer, so I still try to masquerade as the type of specialist-to-role expected in interviews (which I can do to some extent, the full line is "jack of all trades, master of none, but oftentimes better than the master of one") but I do think it under demonstrates the real value I bring to organizations.
I don't have an answer yet: under even friendly circumstances, how would a strong pragmatic generalist unquestionably demonstrate it?
In the smaller category of "generalist programmer" (which, like the OP is too restrictive to cover my usefulness) I have thought of games like "pick any domain from a past job of yours, and we'll work on code problems like that, even if I've never worked in that area before", i.e. suggest the true generalist nature by random sampling. But, its hokey, and it still only covers programming.
I'd love ideas, I must confess the frustration of the "useful-in-practice generalist in a world interviewing for specialists" mismatch has me staying at companies that are no longer ideal places to work longer than I think specialists do. Every time I switch jobs, I think the interviews undervalue me, and once I'm hired as a generalist-disguised-as-specialist, it takes time to migrate organizationally into the generalist role where I contribute the most value (even at small companies).
I've been doing professional software work for 25 years. The last several years I've been working with various JS toolkits (vue/angular, some react) as well as backend stuff (mostly PHP, some Node, some Java, some other stuff), and attendant tooling and whatnot (build systems, testing systems, etc). The last 6 months, I've found myself contracting on different projects swapping between these various stacks, sometimes multiple times per week. I know I look incompetent as a JS developer to some folks who are living in that world 40+ hrs/week for years on end. Couple the various tech stacks with each team's own styles of doing things - which, really, they each seem to think any deviation from 'their' standards is heretical and indicates you're a 'lesser' or 'less experienced' developer - it wears thin after a while..
Trying to 'showcase' that 'jack of all trades' aspect in interviews rarely seems to go well, unless it's not an interview and just a word-of-mouth referral from someone who already 'gets it'.