#specifics vs general

The answer to your question is “it depends on what you want to do”. AAA teams are usually full of specialists, because that’s the benefit of having a large team size. We want cinematic designers working on cinematics, combat designers working on combat, engine programmers working on the engine, VFX artists working on the VFX, and so on and so forth. Three respective specialists at modeling, coding, and designing content will typically produce higher quality work in aggregate than three all-rounders who can kind of do art, kind of write code, kind of create content. AAA games have huge production values, but that comes ta a cost - individual devs on the team often only work on a very small, specialized parts of the overall game.

Most AAA studios don’t hire for generalist roles unless they are one of two things - interns because they have no specialty yet, and senior generalist positions because they have so much experience that they can fill multiple roles. If you feel that either of those roles suits you, then those positions are what you should apply for. If you don’t feel comfortable with either of those roles, then your best bet is to decide what it is you want to specialize in and apply for that. 

This isn’t to say that breadth of skills aren’t useful - they absolutely are. Understanding the basics of software engineering is very useful for a designer, game design principles are helpful to an artist, and art skills are helpful for engineers under the right circumstances. However, if your goal is to work in AAA dev and you aren’t a fresh-faced intern or an experienced senior developer, your best bet is to specialize in something that you like doing, and then look for dev studios hiring for that role in particular.

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I’d like to try to generalize this question a bit more. This is what I am getting from your question:

There’s so much to learn out there, but not all knowledge is equal. What knowledge is more valuable to prospective employers?

To answer this, I’ll use an analogy. Let’s say that you are looking to hire a musician in order to commission some music for a project. You’ve narrowed it down to two candidates.

Candidate A has composed music for a variety of genres, having credits collaborating with multiple artists in hip hop, pop, R&B, rock, and even worked with a classical symphony once before. Candidate A also has a background in music theory and is familiar with the construction and structure of music.

Candidate B is the lead singer for a reasonably successful Bon Jovi tribute band. The candidate is definitely talented, has good pitch control, does a mean performance, and encyclopedic understanding of the music of Bon Jovi. This candidate is mostly self-taught, and has tried making various adaptations of Bon Jovi songs to some other styles. However, this candidate doesn’t have much experience with any other types of music besides Bon Jovi, and never without a Bon Jovi setting.

Which candidate would you choose?

The answer should generally be “It depends”. If I want music that is very much focused on the hair band 80′s-style rock-pop, I’d probably hire candidate B. If I wanted a more broad set of music, I’d hire candidate A. However, I would say that candidate A has a much better overall hireability rating than candidate B, if only because candidate A has a better understanding of the concepts and fundamentals of music than candidate B. More studios would be likely to hire candidate A.

If I hire you, I want you to become useful to the team as soon as possible. Learning to use new tools and languages is part and parcel of the job. I’ve had to learn to use dozens of new tools, languages, and engines to become useful to the development teams I’ve joined over the course of my career, and I’ve never had issues with this. But I’ve certainly seen others struggle when they lacked understanding in fundamentals and have instead focused on the specifics of the tools they were learning.