Generalists, Specialists, Professionals, and Doing Lots of Sanding

Yesterday I talked about how much fun it was to see a professional events team put on a conference and about how startups early on have a lot more need for generalists than for specialists (though that definitely changes as you grow).

But I do think in the core functions of an early-stage startup (engineering, product, sales, marketing, and once you get to a few dozen people, management, too) you need people who are both generalists and professionals. And by professional I mean someone who has devoted themselves to learning their craft.

I come to startups via an engineering path. So I have a lot of engineering biases and default lenses or déformations professionelles as the French say. And one of those lenses is that I think about basically everything we do as debugging.

One of the ways I judge engineers is, are they really, really good at debugging?

I think there’s no such thing as a senior engineer who isn’t great at debugging and even more than that, I think great engineers all love debugging. Debugging isn’t work. I mean, it’s the work, but it’s not work.

A long time ago I read an article about a guitar maker named Michael Millard, and he talked about being an apprentice guitar maker and being struck by two things.

First, that about 90% of guitar making is just sanding wood. And second, that he really liked sanding.

Which is pretty much how I think about being a professional programmer only with debugging in place of sanding.

Michael Millard’s apprenticeship was 50 years ago, and you can buy a custom guitar from him today.

His company is called Froggy Bottom Guitars.

Today’s music is Miles Okazaki playing “Blue Monk.” This track is from Okazaki’s project called “Work,” in which he plays all 70 of Thelonious Sphere Monk’s compositions on solo guitar.