31–40 of 125 posts
The idea was that you could be an excellent biologist or developer, but you always need the transversal skills like interpersonal communication, public speaking, entrepreneurship...
It made sense for me at that time.
I expected this to be about 3D modeling and default pose.
Everybody agrees high quality talent is great. Sick of articles lauding the obvious.
The elephant in the room for almost every management-type article you ever read is that they're all correct: you just don't have the space in your head or the minutes in your day to implement five hundred different good ways of doing things.
I 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 wi…
Tangent, but what is it with corporate teambuilding and this sort of games? I had to participate in one where people had to crawl on the floor, blindfolds on, while the "master" gave commands....... I mean come on, sounds like a fun evening, but in that context it left me quite uncomfortable.
I 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 wi…
For me, T shaped people know their speciality, but know enough of the surrounding context.
I've seen people write technically perfect but practically useless software, because the program didn't fit the business context. I've seen installation horrors where devs and infras took weeks to do a simple deployment, because they couldn't describe to each other what network config needed to be done or what was possible. And of course, the architects that used to be good devs but are now locked in an ivory tower and have no idea that their specs are unusable expensive dreams.
So for me, T shaped people can communicate to other people. They do their thing, but can explain how that thing fits in the whole. They can troubleshoot outside their part if the stack. The boundaries between specialities should be owned by multiple people instead of nobody, and T shaped people make this possible.
This mostly depends on the organization. If you have only access rights for a tiny sliver of the system, you can only be an expert. If technology swaps faster than your underwear, you can't specialize. If people don't get a chance to fail and grow, they won't become neither specialist nor generalist. So a T shaped course should be given to the CxOs and high level managers as they are the ones who can make it happen.
I 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 wi…
That said, your example merely indicates that corporate workshops are bullshit. It does not contradict the value of T people.
In my experience, two highly specialised but disjoint people can only produce rubbish. This is where you need some entry-level intersection of knowledge.
In your case, I don’t expect a FE dev to care about persistence, nor a BE dev to worry about form validation. But both need to be aware of the customer, the business, and robust API design.
Maybe 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.
Of course. All I can do at decent level is computer related stuff, call me one trick pony. Meanwhile I know people who are perfectly capable making money of truck driving, drilling, a lot of construction related work, simple mechanics, and a lot of more.