Been dealing with a lot of people in my general field lately and have realized something rather startling. Most of them are very, very specialized. Capable, but limited in what they can just do without instruction.

For instance, I’ve asked some people to complete tasks that I do routinely, and they did not know how – these are things I just assumed every IT person knew.

The assumption of similarity bias in action, I guess.

I’ve always been a generalist, but it’s startling to find out that the average person in my career area is so restricted. Even in their specialty (and we are talking about a dozen people here), I can do 90% of their work and tasks, sometimes only 80%, but they can’t do any of the things that I do at all.

I really had no idea. I just assumed I was the baseline.

Unfortunately that leaves me running around doing everything, for the most part. Yes, I will configure that Solaris box, and write a Powershell script, and set up Exchange, and figure out how to automate printer installs by office while the other six people do…what? All they know is a small part of one product.

Training would be fine and good, but in a major deadline-constrained project, where is the time?

I don’t even think I am all that good, but I just have done nearly everything and it shows, but didn’t realize how much it showed until this past month or so.