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What Is a Wildcard Person?

wildcardpeople.com

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Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#151

Post by tormeh »

klysm wrote: post #58
xlii wrote: post #43

> 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…

Something I’ve seen repeatedly is that chaos bringers are expected to fit into the consistent results bin in a rigid process when it might be more effective to lock them in a room with a hard problem for a month.

I’d expect adhd peeps to work best in a rapidly shifting environment full of emergencies. Being locked in a room for a month with the same problem is not my idea of a fun time.

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#152

Post by corobo »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #147
corobo wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that accurate? If so there's way more wildcard types on HN than I've bumped into. I need to move to somewhere more wildcard heavy! When this article says wildcard I think "that's me!" because I do anything from web dev (actual role) to sysadmin (preferred role) to IT security to GDPR compliance to billing clients to looking for new clients to project management to hiring to data admin to research and development (…

The list you give is very much what I consider normal software developer job (only even a bit wildcard-y is the billing). Any competent developer should be able to write web stuff, maintain their machine and handle setting up and maintaining servers, they should know about common security problems in the kind of product they are developing and GDPR compliance is pretty much a TODO list of data management features. It…

I'd thoroughly agree with you in honesty, devs should be able to do it all, slackers! If I had a quid for every time I've thought "Full stack, my arse." and had to take over from someone I wouldn't need to work anymore.

My "full stack" (tho I don't bill as that because I'm still pretty terrible at frontend from scratch) is from the hardware up. I built a server from components, configured everything (OS, web server, database), built a web app, installed GitLab and runner, CI/CD'd blue green deployments, etc in about 12 hours to see if I could once.

Oh aye I also built a rival to Twitch on a whim one time. I can't prove these things easily but I do still have the proof of concept nginx config knocking around from that one! https://gist.github.com/cohan/7f676d3f561be62d0550785c015f00...

I used Bunny.net's CDN for serving video and used their logging API to generate analytics (viewers watching, watch count, watch duration, bounce rate, etc). First media streamed through it successfully without leaking any auth keys and without any stuttering video was this, so epic when it worked! https://youtu.be/JozAmXo2bDE

Oddly enough I've made cakes (en-masse), haha. Crap at cooking (working on it) but I can follow a recipe like nobody's business! Stimulating enough in the moment but not a career choice for me. Just helping out a friend.

FWIW I was advising law firms and other big corps on their GDPR compliance until they got their DTO position set up. Not just making sure my own stuff was compliant (tho, that too).

There's also the boring stuff in there like being able to measure whatever the company wants to measure in Google Analytics, blah blah tag manager, A/B testing, this n that ad campaigns. Monitoring services (Zabbix) is something that's been useful to corps too. Sharding databases when they get too big. Backups. The less fun to brag about day to day stuff. Got a hat that needs a head in it? Chuck it here, I'll figure it out :)

Fair enough though, I'll ramp down the feeling special. I'll have to network more so I can find where these folks are working! I'd love to convince a couple of hat racks into joining me on a project some time, haha. One day. Marketing, frontend dev/des, and accounting are currently my main weak spots!

I'll have to hire my own manager so I can get more stuff done at some point too, hadn't considered that as an option (ala https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34158789)

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#153

Post by Reebz »

Manjuuu wrote: post #128
synu wrote: post #22

I tried hiring on these traits in the past, one challenge there is that almost everyone self-identifies as this kind of person (and it’s probably even true, to an extent.) It’s hard in the end to evaluate effectiveness of T-shaped people across a wide spectrum of potential tasks, but I am curious if others have figured it out.

Everyone can self-identify as they like, the real ones in this case are easy to spot just asking them to tell you some stories of absurd problems they solved. They always have a boatload of war stories.

Exactly. The real ones, with experience, can regale with numerous stories of their trials and tribulations. Critically, it won’t come across as boastful, because they’ll detail how they loved the challenge, the context, and the solution.

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#154

Post by mgkimsal »

Manjuuu wrote: post #128
synu wrote: post #22

I tried hiring on these traits in the past, one challenge there is that almost everyone self-identifies as this kind of person (and it’s probably even true, to an extent.) It’s hard in the end to evaluate effectiveness of T-shaped people across a wide spectrum of potential tasks, but I am curious if others have figured it out.

Everyone can self-identify as they like, the real ones in this case are easy to spot just asking them to tell you some stories of absurd problems they solved. They always have a boatload of war stories.

An issue I’ve found is that often these stories don’t tend to be believed. To the untrained ear, they sound like typical BS everyone throws around.

Tiny example: I joined a company and a nightly process was data import. The import was starting to take longer than 25 hours, threatening the “daily” aspect, and on the verge of causing logistical problems because of this.

The problem had been looming for months and has taken more time from multiple folks than anyone anticipated, impacting other projects’ timelines.

It wasn’t on my plate, but I overheard others talking about it. I took a look, and spent a couple days testing out ideas. I got a 25 hour process down to 30 minutes. Had to do it myself first to prove it, because just making suggestions to the “experienced” folks was dismissed with “that’s not how this works, you don’t understand”. After I got it to 30 minutes, the same folks “optimized” my process down to about 25 minutes, then didn’t overly acknowledge the approach I’d used to make this manageable again.

I’ve had pushback on this story like “well, there was probably something you’re leaving out. Everyone likes to think their contribution is the most important, but things are a team effort. We’re not all superheroes”.

If you ask for war stories, be prepared for dailywtf-level stuff sometimes.

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#156

Post by lytefm »

taubek wrote: post #2

Nice read. Kind of reminds me of T shaped people - https://jchyip.medium.com/why-t-shaped-people-e8706198e437

I'd also say that being a T shaped person is how I'd try to be „hirable“ as a generalist. Get really good at one thing that has a title (in my case: „Data Engineer“) but also have a broad range of skills.

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#157

Post by n1c00o »

I have never read something describing me that perfectly, however I'm unsure if the post is not just too generic. Especially in IT where, unless in gigantic and structured corporations, everyone has to hack something everywhere to get it working.

I do consider myself somewhat a "wildcard" dude since I do fit all the points listed in the article, or when I compared myself to friends of mine, where they want roles, categories... But again, I do not want to self-categorise and I would also add that IT helps it.

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#158

Post by lytefm »

still_grokking wrote: post #38
Brajeshwar wrote: post #26

You will like this one. Ken Coleman[1] mentioned the term “Intelligent Override” at a Podcast[2] about Mentors and Leadership with Ben Horowitz on Sep 28, 2022 (looks like a re-run). The idea of someone going beyond the norms, systems and processes, rules and regulations to make things work better. Look out for People who can do “Intelligent Override.” Most companies don’t have many people like that. People who can g…

> The idea of someone going beyond the norms, systems and processes, rules and regulations to make things work better. An INTJ personality. > Most companies don’t have many people like that. INTJs are very seldom. ~2% of the general population. But whether INTJs map well to what was described as "wildcard" I'm not sure. It was more of a ISTP or ESTP type, I guess. https://www.truity.com/page/16-personality-types-myer…

I'd say INFJ would fit the wildcard description more than INTJ. But that's just my own small-sampled observation and me reading a bit about these personality stereotypes.
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