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What Is a Wildcard Person?

wildcardpeople.com

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Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#41

Post by robmerki »

SpeedilyDamage wrote: post #24

Don’t you kind of have to be this person if you want to found a startup? To me this just describes a founder. If you’re not a founder and you’re putting this kind of energy into your job, I hope you at least have substantial equity, because otherwise you’re being taken advantage of. Know your worth! Also if you think this is you, it probably isn’t. There isn’t an “engineering” wildcard or a “marketing” wildcard, the…

Many people who I met while writing this article told me they don’t want the full blown responsibilities of being a founder. They just like doing lots of different things. But ultimately, you’re right.

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#42

Post by 1123581321 »

SpeedilyDamage wrote: post #24

Don’t you kind of have to be this person if you want to found a startup? To me this just describes a founder. If you’re not a founder and you’re putting this kind of energy into your job, I hope you at least have substantial equity, because otherwise you’re being taken advantage of. Know your worth! Also if you think this is you, it probably isn’t. There isn’t an “engineering” wildcard or a “marketing” wildcard, the…

I see what you are saying. I think that some people are good at trying everything when they are alone or the one in full control, and others are good at operating dynamically within a larger organization or a situation not of their choosing. So I think we need two terms and I think wildcard/free electron applies more to the person operating inside an organization or community.

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#43

Post by xlii »

> Furthermore, Wildcards thrive with new tasks and suffer from repetitive ones. They also have a hard time staying outwardly organized.

That’s an ADHD signature. I’d say huge chunk of article describes “managed” ADHD.

I have an argument against having a chaotic wildcard m. It had been imprinted into me that (from management perspective) consistency of result is more important than its brilliance. I.e. it’s better to have consistent low performer than performer who produced great results from time to time.

In general, I think it is true, but experience in IT shows that low performers can’t achieve breakthroughs, so at least few chaos bringers are a healthy choice.

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#44

Post by leftbit »

anonyme-honteux wrote: post #30
golemotron wrote: post #19

Is Wildcard the new 10x?

No it's about generalists versus specialists, problem solvers versus maintainers. There is not one category inherently better than the other contrary to the 10x bullshit, they will thrive in different contexts

A wildcard tends to focus on the problem solving and tries to cut on the fluff. So this feels certainly being more productive than dancing the process steps, striving for perfect code coverage by unit tests, nitpicking in code reviews and messing around with "cool" frameworks.

(I consider myself a "wilcard". Once joined a project for a sprint with a very elaborate development process. Spent about one hour on things I consider "work", the rest of the day was just "idling" to get this "work" past an armada of "quality gates". So yes, on my own I feel several times more productive then some process junkies while delivering "good enough" code, according to circumstances.)

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#45

Post by stevelini »

voidhorse wrote: post #12
paulpauper wrote: post #10

Isn't this the jack of all trades?

Yes, I think the article's goal is to rebrand the jack in a more positive light. "jack of all trades" takes on a generally negative connotation when you recall the rest of the phrase "...master of none". Personally, I think one can become a master of a few things and a jack of many if one taps into the marvelous power of analogy and free association. It's literally a super power of the human brain that few people uti…

The rest of the phrase is "jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one."

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#46

Post by jasonkester »

arabello wrote: post #21

I find myself in this description since forever, but I still can't figure out how to really take advantage of it: it's not always possible to behave like this in your daily job and in your personal life you typically spend a lot of mental energy to understand what to do instead of doing. I fear to end up with a lot of skills and potential unused. It also reminds me of the Scanner people introduced by Barbara Sher in…

still can't figure out how to really take advantage of it

Demonstrate that you can build and ship entire products from scratch.

Get a bunch of them out in the wild and make sure everybody knows that you built every piece. Shipping things is a vanishingly rare thing these days, so it's valuable.

There are companies full of amazing engineers who are all sitting around blocked waiting for backend to give them the API endpoint or the designers to finish tweaking the button. Meet the person running that company and he will hire you to start this afternoon building the thing they actually want built, but can't because these clowns can't ship the last thing.

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#47

Post by nraynaud »

I now literally have an emergency contract with a client. If their developer can’t do it, they call me.

On the other hand I recently got fired from a code monkey job for lack of sustained productivity.

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#48

Post by sprkwd »

voidhorse wrote: post #12
paulpauper wrote: post #10

Isn't this the jack of all trades?

Yes, I think the article's goal is to rebrand the jack in a more positive light. "jack of all trades" takes on a generally negative connotation when you recall the rest of the phrase "...master of none". Personally, I think one can become a master of a few things and a jack of many if one taps into the marvelous power of analogy and free association. It's literally a super power of the human brain that few people uti…

Full quote is:

“a jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one”

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#50

Post by hartator »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #32

17 years ago, there was a popular essay about this sort of person, and the label at the time was "Free Electron": https://randsinrepose.com/archives/free-electron/ Before that, they were known as "generalists", autodidacts, polymaths, etc. The thing is that pretty much any clever person that's easily invested in novel things can become one of these people, so this label isn't reserved for people who are generalists,…

Or they run their own business.
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