A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one?

A little while back, I got my hands on the memoirs of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield. He noted that changes in the space program have affected requirements for astronauts and what the program looks for - back in the days of the Shuttle program, crews were larger, and 50 people were going into space and back every year. On each flight, you might really only need two astronauts trained to operate the robotic arm, with one acting as the primary and the other as a backup. Nowadays, with a crew of just 3 on each Soyuz flight - one of which is guaranteed to be a Russian cosmonaut - astronauts need to wear many hats. You might need to do an EVA walk one day, and run an experiment in the space lab the next - astronauts that are competent at a large number of mission-critical tasks are considered more valuable in the current environment than specialists, because manpower and funding is comparatively limited.

Another factor that changes the nature of astronaut selection is the fact that missions used to be shorter; closer to two weeks. With larger crew sizes up in space for a shorter period of time, finding sufficiently talented people wasn't the primary issue - interestingly, figuring out the best combination of veteran and rookie, military and academic, assertive and easygoing... was something requiring serious consideration. Kind of like putting together a football team, where each position had very specific needs.

In comparison, the International Space Station is staffed for an extended period of time, with a much smaller crew. NASA astronaut Christina Koch just returned from a 328-day mission. So while crews are now more diverse in terms of gender and ethnicity, they are at the same time more homogeneous, as they all need to possess a high level of skill redundancy. If only one of three astronauts aboard the station has medical training, what do you do if something happens to him? So now everyone needs a certain level of medical training.

Now, if we transfer this logic to a more typical workplace, it's certainly true that well-rounded individuals that can learn new things quickly to a decent level of competency are quite useful and important for any company. Personally, over the past decade of professional life in the office, this is sort of the role I've been playing - involved in everything to a certain extent. I've done graphic design, presentations, user manuals, translations, English teaching, music seminars, contract writing... and most of the time, it's hopefully "good enough".

The problem is, "good enough" can only take you so far. In Taiwan, there's a very distinct "good enough" culture (pronounced "chabuduo" 差不多) that keeps us from taking things to the next level. Now of course, there can be good reasons to do things this way. NASA clearly operates under more budget constraints than it once did, and thus prefers generalists over specialists for certain missions. For much of Taiwan's modern history, we've focused finding the perfect mix of cost-cutting and quality to find our niche in the global market. To grossly generalize and oversimplify, our quality may not be as good as the Japanese, but our prices are lower; our prices may not be competitive with China, but our quality is better.

And for the most part, it works out. But when you want to compete with the best of the best, you need to utilize talented specialists, ideally guided by experienced generalists. I'm fully aware that a company that relies on me for graphic design can only go so far when it comes to marketing sparkle.

So there's value in both specialists and generalists, and not to rely upon your generalists, tempting as it may be, when you really should be using specialists.