https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competent_man
Should be pretty easy to con a ship at least, ships aren't that smart /s
Why T-shaped people? (2018)
21–30 of 125 posts
Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)
#22Maybe I didn't understand the article correctly, but are there any people, especially on HN, that identify as specialists? By that I mean, they only know one skill, and that's it, they don't consider themselves T shaped.
I've seen a good amount people that identify themselves as DB people or QA people or sysadmins and wanted to know nothing outside their corner of the woods. As in "don't even explain that to me, just do your part" that was often a source of problems. Once a client demanded that we worked with some encryption framework that required open ports. A delegation of the crypto company had to come to spend the day and hold s…
Maybe the militant single domain focus posture is not driven only by personal values but has something to do with how organization pressures and rewards people? Chastising people for doing things out of the scope of their responsibility is a thing I hear.
Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)
#23Some MBA thought.. why should experts just do what they're an expert in? They should do everything!
Why should generalists be so broad.. they should be an expert in some things!
Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)
#24Maybe I didn't understand the article correctly, but are there any people, especially on HN, that identify as specialists? By that I mean, they only know one skill, and that's it, they don't consider themselves T shaped.
I’ve hired plenty. They were sometimes the best engineers at my company, specifically at executing tasks that were very difficult but they were experts at, and others would have had to take time to spin up and learn the art.
The drawback was that they were pretty much only interested in that specialty. They might be curious about other things, but they were genuinely happiest doing what they loved.
Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)
#25I was working a corporate job a few years back and I guess our boss heard about the benefits of "T-shaped" people / teams.
Anyway to improve productivity it was decided the whole dev team would participate in a half day training course about "T-shaped" people. It was your typical corporate training nonsense, a hour of watching videos, weird team activities including making animal noises with blindfolds on, playing with lego, etc.
The training was concluded by explaining we should no longer pigeon-hole ourselves to duties that fit our job description and if we have capacity in our sprint to pick up other duties.
The whole thing was a disaster. We had backend devs doing frontend development with jQuery when we were using Vue. Frontend devs started doing UX design and things looked like trash. QA was done by basically anyone so as you can imagine bugs started appearing everywhere.
I think this is one of those things that makes sense in theory, but is kinda hard to implement within a corporate structure. As a generalist and someone who came from a startup back ground, I used to find the way corporates pigeon-hole individuals into specific roles quite constraining, but I've come to appreciate that having experts and very explicit duties does make a lot of sense from a quality and accountability perspective. Smaller companies and teams can probably benefit from having their employees wear different hats, but in larger teams I think it's good to exploit the specific expertise of individuals as much as possible.
Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)
#26T-shaped is good, but preferably skills are organically acquired. In my previous work, the T-shaped mantra has been naively pushed and used as an excuse to put employees on all sorts of disjoint activities and trainings that took time away from the main deliverables. This caused people to leave. I instead prefer "JIT learning".
Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen a good amount people that identify themselves as DB people or QA people or sysadmins and wanted to know nothing outside their corner of the woods. As in "don't even explain that to me, just do your part" that was often a source of problems. Once a client demanded that we worked with some encryption framework that required open ports. A delegation of the crypto company had to come to spend the day and hold s…
Maybe the militant single domain focus posture is not driven only by personal values but has something to do with how organization pressures and rewards people? Chastising people for doing things out of the scope of their responsibility is a thing I hear.
That's me most of the time. I used to describe my position as troublemaker. Of course I also used to do things to compensate that perception.
Anyway, whatever the reason, for the company it's interesting to have both the right people and the right policies.
I'm not sure what made that people not even wanting to take a look at firewall permissions. It was obvious that the ports were closed. Actually I learned that my workstation had a public IP address, totally useless anyway because all ports were closed from the outside.
Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)
#28T-shaped is good, but preferably skills are organically acquired. In my previous work, the T-shaped mantra has been naively pushed and used as an excuse to put employees on all sorts of disjoint activities and trainings that took time away from the main deliverables. This caused people to leave. I instead prefer "JIT learning".
JIT learning is a great skill to have but if it's all you do, it becomes unrewarding over long periods of time. There's something very satisfying about executing stuff that you know how to do well, and you're missing out on time spent in a flow state if you're constantly JIT learning. The quality of your work is lower when JIT learning too. Of course if you only do stuff you know well, you stagnate and get bored, so you need to balance it out.
Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)
#29The first time I heard this term was around the same time as the article (around 2018) from a couple of McKinsey folks who were consultants to our company.
That was some of the top rate BS I had to encounter.
Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)
#30The main benefit of being T-shaped is that you can innovate more effectively within your area of (deep) expertise. Since you have a good understanding of the solution space and a “good enough” understanding of the problem space you can search from both sides so to speak, finding the most valuable problem that can be solved economically.
It’s very hard for an I-shaped engineer working with a (problem) domain expert to be as innovative: no matter how much they communicate it will always be a tiny fraction of the internal bandwidth of a single brain.