I think in general, being a generalist in any field puts a ceiling on your career path after a while. And like you said the ceiling is not so much about the generalist being mediocre at many things, its more about others getting confused about how you would be best moved up the career track. But the problem with the concept of a career track is that you are on a track defined by other people. I'd say the only way out is go your own way as you have - career tracks all eventually end somewhere. As a generalist you have a much broader perspective on how to create your own track and a much better vision as to what direction best suits you. I think probably the best way we can encourage up and coming tech generalists is to encourage them to get frustrated with the status quo and to become entrepreneurs. As a result hopefully the next generation of companies will have a deeper appreciation of the competitive advantage of multi-disciplined people.
Entrepreneurs that are engineers and don't have a designer as a cofounder have no choice but to become desingineers.
Generalists are considered to be mediocre (jack of all trades, master of none). I don't know why though - maybe it's because many developers calling themselves specialists in a domain are doing the same thing for 5-10 years in a row and it's scary when other people take a different path.
This helps with some of the big, important things. But running a company will present you with a dozen of design challenges. A month. You can't just deal with these all contractually.
Thats just the thing - while that worked for me working a bit at the forefront of this trend, this doesn't feel like a long term solution. Entrepreneurship != being a desingineer, as the market is clearly showing. A student / aspiring desingineer shouldn't feel forced to start a company too soon simply because we lack the structure to help support that student grow into our industry properly.
I don't think they're forced to start a company. The trick is defining yourself in a way that provides a clear example of your value to a company, and how exactly they can monetize that. That's difficult to do right now, for the reasons you described.
The reason that everyone thinks 'desingineers' should go into entrepreneurship is because of the tremendous advantage this gives them. Bigger companies are failing to capitalize on people with these skills. These same skills allow desingineers to produce higher quality work at a faster pace for a cheaper price then any other combination of programmer and/or designers. This naturally leads to a competitive advantage that can(should?) be capitalized on.
Being a designer-coder is not being a generalist, it's being a double expert. It's like being a ninja unicorn. Everybody wants one… Chris Dixon's original tweet is right.
In my experience, a designer-coder is always in demand and can name their price.
