Specialization is for insects.
but man, there are some times….
We have a project in house that involves a very specific type of grinding. And we have a Japanese engineer in house training our guys to do so. He’s very very very good, and he knows what he’s doing like few people I’ve ever seen.
(You can hear the butt coming, can’t you?)
I had to show him how to get to the Ethernet paramters on his own machine.
I have never allowed myself to become an ‘Expert” on anything. I think this type of specialization is not for insects, but morons.
I am conversant in a half dozen CNC programming languages. Three or four Robotics languages (In the early days, those overlapped) I can program a couple of different types of CMM. I can do FEA on solids, using software, and even to a lesser extent using just plain old math. I have been instrumental in establishing the industry standards for communication between machine tools and other devices, and am still involved in how those standard are implemented; I even managed to steer a group of academics away from silliness and towards useful functionality in a couple of organizations I belong to. (Pitiably, they are now using my tuition to make cash, which is somewhat annoying) I go where my interests and my requirements take me.
I like that I can be called upon to do damned near anything, and i will adapt to it- even at this stage in my life, when most people’s brains have ossified beyond repair.
but sometimes, I do still wish I was a one trick pony, doing one job simply and efficiently, better than anyone else would even consider possible.
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There was a quote at the beginning of my Active Devices textbook from many moons ago:
“It is the mark of an educated mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness where only an approximation is possible.â€
Words to live by. Find a quiescent bias point that’ll work and let’r rip. I find I get bored to death with a deep-dive into any subject. I figure 95% is close-a-damn-nough. As far as I’m concerned, variety is indeed the Spice of Life.
Of course, being a jack-of-all-trades, ALL your friends, relatives and acquaintances seek your advice on every subject known to man. I guess it’s nice to be needed, aye?
Reminds me of Driving Miss Daisy:
Hoke: Mr. Werthan, you ever had folks fightin’ over you?
Werthan: Nope.
Hoke: It sho do make a man feel good.
Like most people, I believe I am really good at a lot of things. Then I meet someone who really is and I am forced to re-evaluate my position.
I understand that I am a better shooter with pistols and rifles than 90% of the population of the USA, but I have met a few experts that are such an order of magnitude in greater ability as to make me look like a rank amatuer.
I try to form associations with those people that are just above my skill level enough that I can learn from them, without them being so smart that we have no common langueage.
I also am good at a lot of stuff, but expert at none. The ability to learn fast and grasp big picture concepts has stood me in good stead over the years.
Being the best at one specific thing isn’t nearly as useful as simply being really good a wide range of things.
Unless that one thing is removing high profile transnational progressives from the gene pool and getting away scot free. Then you’d be my hero.
“Unless that one thing is removing high profile transnational progressives..”
You and I need some range time, away from everyone else’s eyes and ears.
There’s a guy whose whole business is based on setting bearing clearances for the steam turbines used in power plants. He’s one of a handful of people in the world who knows how to do it.
THAT is specialization.
I work at a small civil engineering firm. Whenever we have to do something we’ve never done before, I am the one that has to figure it out. Which can be fun, or it can make me want to shoot myself, depending on how successful I am and how many people are waiting for the results. We don’t do enough of one thing for me to get to be an expert at anything.
New Division chief came into my office and asked what each of my staff members socialized in.
“We’re all cross trained in every function of the office. That way any one’s absence doesn’t affect office efficiency.” And yes, I quoted Heinlein’s “Specialization is for insects”
The Chief’s face went blank and he left. Later learned the Chief’s “greet the troops” speech focused on, you guessed it, specialization.
I was still on the job 2 Division chiefs later.
Jack of all trades, master of a few of them here.
I can’t think of anything more mind-numbingly, body-achingly boring than getting up every morning and doing the same job for eight hours. When I worked in the factory years ago, I remember watching people run punch presses day after day after day and never aspiring to do anything else.
Yesterday and today I’m building Windows servers on virtual machines on a physical server located 600 miles away. Tomorrow I’ll be writing documentation. Friday, who knows?
Sometimes my job is a pain in the ass, but rarely is it boring :)
I lack for boring.
I ran a drill press for a year and it drove me up the wall.
I can do a lot of things, not really well, but good enough.
Kind of my motto I guess, Good Enough.
In my job, we only hire highly skilled specialists, and then put them to work doing generic staff officer work.
I don’t mind actual experts. People who THINK they’re experts, and screw things up because “I don’t make mistakes”, and set things up so everyone has to ask them how to fix things when something goes wrong… THEM I mind.
A lot.
Interestingly, I was told years ago that the reason so many Americans were either programming or teaching programming in Japan was because programming in Japanese requires literacy in all three of the seperate written Japanese languages.
Some aspects of three dimensional imaging can only be expressed in Kanji characters, others in hiragana, and a few only in katakana.
They tried to get around the problem with a Latin script called Romanji, but it lost in the translation, so they usually teach their programmers English.
Makes you wonder what Japan would look like if they hadn’t imported Chinese writing.
There has been a lot of language reform in Japanese since the war, though; they’ve cut the number of essential kanji down to about 2000 or so. I don’t think you could write intelligently in Chinese knowing only 2000 characters, but then Chinese does not have hiragana :)