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I always used to be firmly in the "specialisation is for insects"
camp, but after a time, I figured out that such extremist positions
don't make much sense in the real world. Like many techwhirlers, I
do all kinds of stuff that goes far beyond my formal job title
(basically, an editor), and while I love being a Geoff of all trades, I
recognize and accept the tradeoffs: I'm nowhere near as good at
my 20th specialty [sic] as I am at my first, and I'd be much better
at my first specialty if I didn't have to dole out my neurons among
so many other specialties. I do decent _information_ design work,
but I'm nowhere near as good as our graphiste at the layout and
_graphic_ design tasks, and I'm the first to admit it.
Whether to work as part of a team of specialists or a team of
generalists probably depends more on the nature of the work you're
doing than on whether one system is inherently better than the
other. If you're in a high-volume, production-oriented environment,
then an assembly-line process often makes much more sense: five
specialists working in sequence will be much faster and more
effective than five generalists, each trying to do the whole job. If
you're in a relatively low-volume situation, generalists can get along
quite well, thank you very much. In the middle, of course, you
either have to adopt or have the luxury of adopting some
intermediate solution; in my current job, for example, I work directly
with the graphistes to produce a collaborative design that takes
advantage of both our areas of expertise. I've made sure to acquire
at least a minimum level of expertise in each of my job skills, and a
high level of expertise in the ones for which I can't collaborate with
a specialist who's better than I am at that job, and that strikes me
as a reasonable balance.
