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What Is a Wildcard Person?

wildcardpeople.com

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Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#71

Post by neilv »

Jensson wrote: post #70
neilv wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be easier to hire people who show technical strength at something , demonstrate picking up something else to some degree, and (most importantly, IMHO) are up to functioning as part of a team . We need people motivated by helping the team achieve success , not only looking good on their individual metrics and deliverables. Everyone adaptively focused on the collective goal can be so much more easily and efficien…

> Might be easier to hire people who show technical strength at something Yeah, hire for intelligence and curiosity. An intelligent and curious developer probably studied algorithms to a useful level, if you don't understand them well you either aren't smart or you lack the curiosity to look into new topics. A generalist developers who isn't even at that level in their subjects isn't worth their salt, I'm not sure wh…

I think your argument might be interpreted as encouraging Leetcode interviews, which I'd disagree with.

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#72

Post by beebmam »

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,…

Is this simply an apriori argument? Do you have any evidence to back up your claim beyond your reasoning?

I don't find it very persuasive, and based on my own experiences being a generalist for the majority of my career, I can say it certainly doesn't apply to me. My compensation is >$500k a year and I've been a software engineer since 2010.

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#73

Post by braingenious »

tz18 wrote: post #65
braingenious wrote: post #9

“What is a person with somewhat varied skills??” I scream as I smash my debit card number into my keyboard to buy a domain for this concept that I’ve just invented. I smile slyly at my partner, a meth pipe.

Honestly, will these people ever stop huffing their own farts? This site is so full of itself sometimes. Are all of you guys really THAT engineer to the degree that you act like it on this site? Are we really going to celebrate a new marketing term to sell the idea of knowing more than one thing back to engineers? Like, hey, what if, hey maybe what if it was a good idea for people to know more than just the very narr…

>Are all of you guys really THAT engineer to the degree that you act like it on this site?

I love this question. It touches upon a phenomenon that I’ve made light of repeatedly on this website.

My answer is this: This isn’t a website for or of engineers. It’s largely a website to peddle “Goop”-style lifestyle nonsense to people that desperately want to be called engineers.

It isn’t a bunch of engineers, it’s a bunch of folks that have read some stuff about engineering in order to help become the next Gwenyth Paltrow or Tim Ferris or Jessica Alba. It’s probably one of the funniest currently-surviving circular firing squads on the internet.

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#74

Post by leftbit »

nigerianbrince wrote: post #52

How Wildcards Thrive: * things every single software developer likes How Wildcards Suffer: * things every single software developer hates What Wildcards Need: * things every single software developer needs What a snake.

Don't think so. For example some devs I know just love following an elaborate development process with as many quality gates as possible. Some like to glue as many complex frameworks together into a solution as possible. Some just love to do the same things the same way again and again. Wildcards don't.

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#75

Post by fuzzfactor »

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…

>I fear to end up with a lot of skills and potential unused.

The sooner you can achieve a lot of different unused skills & potentials, the better you can end up with fewer of them in disuse.

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#76

Post by Jensson »

leftbit wrote: post #44
anonyme-honteux wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Organisations are built by interesting people on top of boring people.

Boring people makes for better building material, they are easy to work with, put them somewhere and they will do their task, without them you wont get large lasting organisations, the value cannot be realized without a combination of both.

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#78

Post by rendall »

I think that's all of us, really.

I'm reminded of Heinlein's quote "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#79

Post by MikeDelta »

J_cst wrote: post #3

That's basically talking about me. On my job they call me Mr. Wolf and I love it. The description is quite accurate, main difference being that the article focuses mainly on semi-marketing tasks instead I tend to be assigned higher level issues (I mainly deal with emergencies raised by our CEOs). It was nice to read it, I feel less lonely now.

Cool nick, does it refer to a character or the animal itself?

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#80

Post by [deleted] »

BlackFly wrote: post #69
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,…

Yes, the idea and the debate is as old as history. I prefer the quote from Heinlein, "Specialization is for insects." Because actually, if you look at well run organizations, everybody needs to be a generalist to some degree. You don't just work in a silo and ignore every other aspect of what your organization does, otherwise you produce deficient solutions that your colleagues in their own siloes need to work around…

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