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Many hats

Holding several unrelated jobs at once. A survival adaptation at small companies, and the closest thing I have to a trained skill.

Also called wearing many hats, the generalist

At one point my title was both Director of Technology and Director of Engineering. Before that, I ran engineering and customer success at the same time. That arrangement was either a governance failure or an education, depending on how you look at it.

I have also been a UPS supervisor, a corporate PHP developer, a technical producer for virtual-world builds, a lead blogger running a team of writers, the digital director on national political campaigns, a tech lead for an offshore team, and a CTO. None of those transitions were planned. All of them were the same underlying move: the thing needed doing and I was the person standing there.

For most of the last two decades, specialization paid better and looked better on a résumé. I think that is changing for an unglamorous reason. When execution in one discipline becomes cheap, it becomes more useful to understand how several disciplines connect.

See also Player-coach.

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