The agile community is full of stuff on generalists. Ideally, you should be able to juggle coffees for your developers while riding a one-wheeler, and playing the guitar to “Master of Puppets” from Metallica at the same time. Oh, and you really should have found that bug while doing all that.

That’s a task close to impossible. Let’s take a step back, and take a look into another field of work: cooking. How do you react to generalists there? Let’s see.

Caution: Before reading on, make sure, you had enough to eat. (Or didn’t, depending on how fast you can get weak.) This blog post includes references to lots of yummy meals, and contains itself 2000 kcal.

Cooking specialists?

Before we can define generalization successfully in the cooking field, we need to be able to identify possible directions of specialism. Generalizing is a relationship that cannot exist without specialization. In order to generalize, you have to define the opposite specialities first. Generalization then becomes the movement away from one particular speciality towards at first two, then maybe three, and on the other extreme all the specialities that you can identify in the according field of work.

For cooking, there are several ways you can think about specialization. You may specialize in green, or veggie foods. You may specialize as meat-only cook, or even become a beef master. You can specialize in cooking just with the oven, or focus on grilling activities (may favorite). Consider a cook that is proficient with the barbecue grill to properly prepare a cake with it besides serving you the steak first. Awesome! A meaty cake. I would love that one.

But let’s consider some alternatives. There are cooks in the high pricing segment, like five-star cooks. There are fast food chains that provide you meals with fewer turn-over costs (and other different qualities).

But there’s more. There are cooks that focus on local specialities. There are cooks for the German kitchen, serving bratwurst, haxen, and sauerkraut. Then there are Italian cooks that can serve pizza, pasta, and other specialities from the South-European country. Oh, and don’t forget about the Japanese food. If you’ve ever been to a Japanese steakhouse, you know what I mean. (I should certainly find one in Germany.)

Oh, and then there are cooks that specialize on a particular piece of the whole course. For example there are specialists at creating dessert, like an ice-cake (yummy!). And there are specialists for soup, for salad, and main dishes.

As you can see, there is a whole bunch of stuff that you may focus on. Now, let’s take the counter-position, and see where generalization would lead us to.

Generalizing cooks

How could a cook generalize? When considering the five-star cook, she is probably already generalizing. She knows a couple of dish well enough to receive the five-star certification. For the certifier it does not matter where these dish come from. They only need to be yummy, well prepared, well served.

Or should a cook generalize in the sense of dish he serves? A cook that’s only good at meat probably won’t win many prices in the long run. To prepare a proper meal, he also needs to serve the openers, and he also should have a clue about the composition of the whole course, like which wine to serve with the deer, and what kind of dessert fits better: ice cream or fruits?

Then what about the fast food cook versus the noble restaurant cook? The fast food cook knows a bunch of recipes, and he has streamlined his whole business according to his margins – and what people are willing to pay for it. In a noble restaurant people eat because they want to taste something special. Only the best ingredients get into each individual meal, and that also has an end result on the price. And of course, the overall experience in a five-star restaurant is totally different than the one in the next local Wendy’s.

Oh, and if you can’t get a dessert at the local shop, then you are probably going to the next ice-cream shop, and spend your money there. That might be ok in certain regions of the city. But if the next ice-cream bar is 20 miles away, your customers are more likely to complain about it.

And, finally, you may generalize across country specialities. Besides burgers you may serve sushi, paella, and Irish Stew. You are so proficient in your cooking skills that you can serve all meals from all over the world. 120 meals in your whole menu.

One cook to rule them all

The other day, when I stood in a fast food shop in our home town, waiting for our lunch, I started wondering. That shop sold Döner, Pizza, and a couple of German and Austrian dishes. That shop appeared to be a generalizing shop.

As a customer, did I like it? I started to wonder whether they followed the demand from the market, or tried to fill a particular niche in the local market by offering everything. I certainly wasn’t convinced that many of the offered dish were good while waiting in that shop.

Now, after writing about this experience, I think there is a tremendous difference between a five-star generalist cook, and a generalizing fast food cook. I trust the five-star cook on another level than I trust the tiny small “Fetthalle” around that corner that serves lots of different international foods. I prefer to be more like a five-star software developer rather than a generalizing “fast code” hacker.

That made me wonder what the outside impression from us software generalists would be? Should we be more like generalizing fast food cooks or like five-star cooks in the end? Well, in the end, software development has only to do with stuff you can’t see – if you won’t take a look. Food is different.

Nom-nom.