All doctors, lawyers and real engineers I know only focus on one aspect. They are specialists. I know lawyers who specialises in rape cases, conveyancing, ligitation, but I have never met a lwayer who is expected to solve a rape case today and register a bond tomorrow. Same with doctors. They specialise and only focus on one domain. I was talking about skills when I included CEO, not about risk. When there is lots of money involved, almost everyone will accept to assume that risk and collect rewards.
There's the concept of T-shaped expertise. Start with a broad base but then narrow down to a specialty. So you've kind of got both. Doctors, for instance, still have to know the basics of every bodily system, regardless of what they specialize it, because everything affects everything in the body.
But even a lawyer specialised in criminal law will have gotten a broad education in contract law, property , civil procedure.
In my engineering school, mechanical engineers were taught the basics of electrical engineering.
There is a lot of value in gaining a good amount of breadth before specialising, even if just to ease communication with specialists of adjacent fields.
The best people in every field are people who are focused on one aspect and one aspect only. Linus Torvalds only focus on C programming and kernels. If you judge him based on these lists, he will be regarded incompetent because he can't do UI and is proud of it. He doesn't even try to learn the basics about it because he has his speciality and do it very well.
Lionel Messi doesn't try to be the best header or best defensive midfielder. He focuses on dribbling and scoring goals.
I'm always impressed at my primary care doc's breadth of knowledge. Whatever the topic (knee injury, heart rate, asthma...), he has working knowledge at easy recall, which he augments by consulting electronic reference materials during appointments—all while staying engaged with the patient (me). This is all in the context of a standard physical, and often the subjects (such as the knee injury) haven't been mentioned beforehand.
I do think he's in the top 5% of MDs, so of course we can't expect this of everyone. And specialists obviously specialize. But there is a large segment of the profession that requires a wide breadth of knowledge in a domain that frequently changes.
Is he a GP or a Specialist? From what I know, the list of best Doctors is full of specialists, not generalists. I am yet to hear someone recommending a General Practitioner because they have broader knowledge. It is always Specialists who are focused on one domain and one domain only. Not saying specialists don't have knowledge about other things medical-related. They do but their knowledge is limited. Just like my knowledge about firewalls and networking is limited because I focused on development.
BTW, my career has been focused on development, but I still try to maintain enough knowledge that I could jump in at any point of the stack and be useful.
It's not like a typical developer is going to be programming a web app one day and an embedded system for a car the next day. Even "full-stack" developers are still specializing in one domain.
Anyone can accept risk. Accurately evaluating and effectively mitigating it is the skill, plus predicting a profitable direction and setting it in motion, maintaining accountability, negotiation and fundraising; the list goes on and looks very different from dev skillsets.
Maybe we need to see those skills map. I can't wait for CEOs to disagree that you don't need those skills. Most CEOs became CEOs because they started the company or are connected to the owners of the company. Most CEOs are just political leaders of a business. They didn't need to learn HR, Finance, IT etc in order to run the company.
