Ask HN: Generalists, when do you say "I know enough" about any particular topic?

I stop when I find a solution to the problem. Most of the time the learning happens along the way, not necessarily in the solution itself but all the things you try and iterate on your journey to the solution.

Everything changes in tech by the minute ... but also nothing changes. For web applications it has been HTML, CSS and JS for nearly 30 years. XMLHttpRequest/AJAX came out 25+ years ago. There have been many improvements along the way, like applying design patterns instead of cgi-bin directories with scripts that had a +x modifier on them in the file system. But the base technologies have not changed all that much. We still submit HTML form's with input fields to a back-end server that handles that data. We're still rendering HTML and using CSS to style it. Gone are custom UI toolkits like Flash or Java Applets. Maybe WASM is something to look into but it feels like its not mainstream to me.

If you don't want to get left behind, learn the basic building blocks at a deep level, they don't change much.

In my case being a generalist is less about knowing a lot about everything, and more about knowing how to work things out, and how to bridge the gap between specialised fields.

I do end up knowing a little bit about lots of things, but in terms of "knowing enough", I only need to go into a scenario with enough knowledge to get some traction on the issue I'm working on. Once I've established a bridgehead, the rest follows naturally.

I think it goes in cycles. I used to work with Kafka and so I learned something about it. I haven’t touched kafka for 4 or so years, not sure what has changed but I feel like I want to revisit it. Same for k8s, clickhouse, etc.

Happens the same with the fundamentals (networking, OS, etc). I revisit new aspects of these topics every now and then. I still haven’t worked deeper with llms. Last week I tried for the first time coding with an agent. I take it slowly.

For instance, I never cared about learning react or vercel. I guess it paid off.

when you finish the task which drove you to learn about the topic to begin with

I’m not setting boundaries - and I think you will notice when to shift! When noone and no book seems to teach you anything new about a certain topic. When you read the latest book and think, „hmm yes, but i think they omitted a and b and c and in reality this isn’t so nicely separated and way more nuanced“. Then it is definitely time to shift your attention to a different topic. I’m doing this for decades now - and i think lots of others too. You will never learn all about everything. But it’s fun to try :-)

I learn what I need in order to achieve my task or solve a problem at hand. So that is the "i know enough" point. And that goes for everything, even my main focus do day to day work. It is good to be aware of some tech/capabilities but learning it only for the sake of learning it is a waste of time as if anything that you do not use, you forget. For example, you can learn 70% of features of a new language you are picking up and that will get you through 99% of your time. There is absolutely no need to learn the remaining 30% of the features that you'll never use.

So in short, learn what you need, but be aware of the options in case you might have a use case for some of them in the future in which case you will know where to look and what to learn.

I often find myself feeling like an imposter when describing (I know enough of) the different skills I possess i.e Product Design, UX Design and Frontend Engineering. In my opinion the person solely doing one thing will probably know more than you in any of the above. But when it comes to a problem and solving the problem it becomes easier (saying I know enough) after researching and learning about it from different perspectives. The scope is narrower here than talking about an entire discipline. I don't know if it made sense tho

Utility, mainly. I know just enough to Provide Value; the concept of 'enough' doesn't really exist for my true interests.

Usually, when 'specialists' start asking my help to debug their area of expertise.

When you notice that you may be getting too deep into the wrong topic. Solving a problem is not just taking one approach, one relevant topic, one way to solve it. That depends on the problem, the situation and the system it is in, it might worth it to go all the way down for some of them, but you have to evaluate.

I learn about something when I need to know in order to do something I'm trying to do, or when I'm curious. The second one is kind of self-limiting - when I don't have time or energy, I'm less curious.

I don't feel that I "ought" to know. There's too much. I can't. So I learn what I need, and what I want.

Left behind? You have no choice. When you're learning A, you're not learning B through Z, except that there are a lot more than 26 options. You can't learn it all. There's simply not enough time.

The real question is, of the limited amount of time you have for learning, what's the most important/valuable thing for you to be learning now?

When I get bored of the topic. I have ADHD so that factors in to this.

In my case, my “generalism” is mostly driven by ADHD, it happens when my brain gets bored with one subject. I don't think it's conscious in any way. I tend to go through phases: I’ll get into a topic, then switch to another, then another. After a few months, I circle back to the first subject, picking up where I left off (minus whatever I’ve forgotten). And the cycle repeats.

once i have determined the leading exponent in any field and understanding his views, i ask whether i know enough to determine whether the information is useful to my purpose. if so, i continue to go deeper; if not, i know enough.

Isn't this dictated by your available free time?

Or project-based? If you are a writer, for example, it's usually project based.

Otherwise, if you really have a hard time setting boundaries, then you might be the type to orient yourself around the states of your social circles. They definitely have boundaries when they stop listening or caring.

If you can't say enough is enough yourself, let someone you trust, or in whose competence you trust, do it for you.

I would say something like "when does it stop being useful" but the 'real' infinite game is all about curiosity and there's almost no players, just uninterested and destructive shareholders, so I'm gonna go with "do you have a thread that connects it all or not?" If you don't, and it only leads to more and more excursions, fix that point of depth where some subject still interfaces with the other stuff and stop there.