Well said @hondanhon – being ‘awkwardly specialised’ *is* a thing

Dan Hon hits the spot:

One thing that I’ve noticed is a sort of awkward specialisation for a bunch of people in their thirties who’ve grown up with the internet and worked in the industry. It seems like there’s not that great a title for people who’ve “done internet stuff” but who weren’t firmly in one camp or another. In other words, the mythical Design/Developer unicorn. Instead, there’s a whole bunch of people who sit firmly in that Venn diagram intersection who are *very good* at getting along with designers and developers, and are able to bridge that gap, and yet precisely because they *don’t* fit into one camp or the other are eminently unemployable. Because you’d much rather hire a unicorn, a designer/developer, than a translator, right?

Here is the thing about those people in the middle. Those people in the middle see systems and like to solve problems. They still see the power of the internet in helping to solve those problems, and to make things better. But they’re not specialists. They’re not designers and they’re not writers, they’re not developers and they’re not ops or sysadmins. Perhaps one way of looking at them is saying that they’re Product Managers (but not Project Managers). But they’re the people who help figure out what it is that you want to do, and help you do it. Regardless of the *title*, there’s still a need for the people who can keep it all in their head. Who understand enough about all the little bits – but who might not be able to implement them – that they have respect and trust to lead. Maybe that’s a thing.