Career Path
· 8 min readChoosing between depth and breadth in your 20s
Specialist vs generalist — a framework for picking your next role.
The real trade-off
Depth compounds: by year 5–7 a specialist commands a clear premium and gets pulled into harder, higher-leverage problems. Breadth optimizes for optionality: you find the niche you'd never have predicted, and you can switch industries when a category dies.
A simple decision rule
Go deep when (a) you can name the thing you want to be world-class at, (b) the field is growing, and (c) you enjoy the work on a bad day. Go broad when any of those is missing — and treat the next 2–3 years as a structured exploration with a hard review date.
What both paths require
Pick roles where you ship visible work, work near strong operators, and get honest feedback. Title and brand matter less than the slope of your learning curve.