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Why T-shaped people? (2018)

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Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)

#41

Post by bratbag »

kypro wrote: post #25

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…

I've found T shaped people are good for early startups, where you can have one person wearing multiple hats.

If you are large enough for corporate training events, chasing T shaped people probably isn't that important.

Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)

#42

Post by iamacyborg »

bratbag wrote: post #41
kypro wrote: post #25

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…

I've found T shaped people are good for early startups, where you can have one person wearing multiple hats. If you are large enough for corporate training events, chasing T shaped people probably isn't that important.

It’s valuable at the management level when dealing with cross-disciplinary teams. You don’t need to understand what any one individual function does to any real depth, but you need enough passing familiarity to ensure the team works well together and focuses on the right components.

Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)

#44

Post by jason-phillips »

rtontic wrote: post #10

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.

> are there any people, especially on HN, that identify as specialists?

I specialize in solving problems.

I've never found anyone with my capacity for researching, understanding and quickly putting together a plan to address some exigency.

Whether that be triaging an issue in an opaque production environment or crafting a marketing plan to help tell the story of what my local community does well, that's what I specialize in.

Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)

#45

Post by satvikpendem »

I heard about T shaped people before, and several years ago, I thought, why stop at T? I wanted to become a block shaped person. I wanted to be like the autodidacts and polymaths of old, Newton, da Vinci, Franklin, and I wanted to know as much as I could about as many things as I could, at least in the software world.

Since then, I started teaching myself concepts from the ground up in any software field you could imagine; compilers, programming language theory, category theory, functional programming, low level embedded systems, front end web design and development, backend development, devops, networking, data structures and algorithms, databases, distributed systems, operating systems, you name it, I've done at least some of it. So far it's been the best intellectual investment of my life. I just know so much about how stuff works now that I didn't before and it feels great.

I'm also interested in entrepreneurship and building SaaS products, so I also had to teach myself sales and marketing, product design, the UX process including interviewing potential customers, and so on, which are whole fields in themselves, but now I can confidently say that I can design and code a product from scratch, market it, and have a decently high chance of it being successful.

If anyone else has the time, I highly recommend getting acquainted with these various fields, you may think they're unrelated but you'd be surprised, I've often found overlap between disparate fields where they fixed the very problem I was facing in a different field.

Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)

#46

Post by yolo3000 »

kypro wrote: post #25

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…

If you're part of a software factory and only turn a psd into a html/css website then yes, knowing a programming language and doing backend doesn't help. If you work at a company which sells expertise to others, then they will want you to be an expert at something.

If you work on a product team then it really helps to know a bit of everything, architecture, writing frontends, writing apis, databases, designing scalable services, managing hundreds of servers and other infra through automation, ci/cd, data engineering, ux, testing, talking to users, talking to stakeholders, gathering requirements, managing a project, managing yourself. From time to time you may ask the help of an expert.

Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)

#47

Post by rzmd »

satvikpendem wrote: post #45

I heard about T shaped people before, and several years ago, I thought, why stop at T? I wanted to become a block shaped person. I wanted to be like the autodidacts and polymaths of old, Newton, da Vinci, Franklin, and I wanted to know as much as I could about as many things as I could, at least in the software world. Since then, I started teaching myself concepts from the ground up in any software field you could im…

How did you go about doing this, in a practical sense?

Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)

#48

Post by Twisell »

satvikpendem wrote: post #45

I heard about T shaped people before, and several years ago, I thought, why stop at T? I wanted to become a block shaped person. I wanted to be like the autodidacts and polymaths of old, Newton, da Vinci, Franklin, and I wanted to know as much as I could about as many things as I could, at least in the software world. Since then, I started teaching myself concepts from the ground up in any software field you could im…

I think it's important to note that the OP totally agree with you and even provided a link to a better suited metaphor in the last section of his post.

> Dave Rooney uses a metaphor of “icicle-shaped”, that is, people who pick up whatever skills they need when faced with a problem to solve. This matches more closely to how I actually operate. https://medium.com/@daverooneyca/icicle-shaped-people-45f364...

Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)

#49

Post by majkinetor »

kypro wrote: post #25

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…

> I think this is one of those things that makes sense in theory, but is kinda hard to implement within a corporate structure.

It was bad implementation clearly. You don't get to be generally good at different stuff without first being a lowish worker on each of those, having a person to hold your hand. You can't just declare that everybody should do anything after 2 hours of generic presentation and call it a day.

Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)

#50

Post by cuteboy19 »

vivegi wrote: post #29

The 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.

It has by now trickled down to all levels of corporate consulting
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