What's your value proposition as an Engineer?
Types of engineers,
- Specialists - Specialize in a particular area, eg: Front-end, Back-end, DevOps, SRE etc.
- Generalists - Full-stack generalists.
My value proposition
Right now, I consider myself as a generalist. I've always wanted to explore end-to-end of stacks and understand how systems work. At certain points I've considered becoming a specialist, but I always get bored when working on the same thing for a prolonged period of time. This doesn't mean I don't believe in specialists. They are so important for highly complex systems.
Being a generalist allows you to build products end-to-end. This skill is useful for product companies at early stage.
What about LLMs (AI)?
At the time of writing, LLMs can mimick what generalists and specialists can do to a certain extent. However I don't believe they'll replace generalists or specialists in near future. Instead they'll act as co-pilots for both generalists and specialists.