It's good for the first 10 engineering positions. It's good for founders. It's good for managers and PMs at any size company. It can be good for consulting on ENTIRE small projects.
It's not good for consulting on parts of a larger project. It's not good for being a 10+ engineering hire.
It all depends. The master of one is more likely to do well as a consultant or in a corporation with a lot of division of labor.
But startups usually require you to do many different things, even things completely outside of your experience. I was hired at one to do web development, but also built and ran our hosting machines, developed training materials, taught classes, helped sell a little even.
It was a good experience. It felt like you just did your best even if you didn't know what you were doing. And if it worked, beautiful. If not, we'll find another way.
Thanks for the reply. I'd love to be able to get a job in a startup. Here in Florida a large majority of the IT industry is large older companies. Most use a Microsoft or Java stack (both which I have zero experience with).
I think I would fit in better with a startup than with a larger corporate company. I believe I'm a progressive thinker with great ideas. I love adopting technology early and that's usually not such a great fit for these large companies.
It's quite obvious the specialists always makes more as employees and consultants in a particular field. Just think of it this way, you're the cook of the family, you make simple databases in Access, and do some bookkeeping. Would you make more than a chef for cooking even though you can use Access? Would you make more than a CS graduate for programming even though you can do basic accounting? Would you make more than a CPA for accounting even though you can cook? No, of course not.
By the same reasoning, you wouldn't make more than an expert DBA, a jQuery expert, or an expert designer if you just knew a thing or two about a thing or two.
Now, that doesn't mean you couldn't start your own business, do all those things, and make more money as a entrepreneur. But if you want to make more money working for someone else, you need to get a specialty.
I'm not a master in my sense of the word. Basically what I mean is I'm not a senior level developer in any technology. Still a junior level. I recently built two applications in PHP both of which were finished in under a month and are currently handling about 5K users per day. Both were for local state level government programs.
I did everything by myself from the architecture and design to the server setup and development.
I was thinking the same. People see me as a jack of all trades, sometimes, and I really connected with some of the points the original poster made. But it's usually because the other person doesn't know a lot about whatever "trade" I'm doing at the moment, that they would call me a jack of all trades. Backend developers respect my backend work, designers respect my design work, etc, and that doesn't make me a master of none, nor you.
Sounds like you have most, if not all, of the skills to build your own company. I know I'm not answering your question in the original post, just wondering what barriers you have to starting your own company.
At one point I was doing work for myself when I was just doing simple web design and stuff like wordpress sites. I may try it again as a developer. The only thing holding me back is the fact that I have a son now, so I can't just quit my job and rely on a few jobs here and there.
It's not good for consulting on parts of a larger project. It's not good for being a 10+ engineering hire.