What shape of person doesn't read the article but boldly counter-claims things the article actually says?
It seems like that's a pretty common shape.
Why T-shaped people? (2018)
51–60 of 125 posts
Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)
#52if I hold my arms up, i'm T shaped.
Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)
#53Maybe 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.
Reminds me of that joke story about a needle-point sharpener guy who's better than anyone else in the world at it, but then surprised when he accidentally learns about the needle eyes. After all, the needle eyes are not his specialty, he's not required to know about them!
Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)
#54My first boss talked about "F shaped" people and encouraged me to try and develop in that way. I later discovered he was paraphrasing and extending this "T shaped" idea. This was originally described by Tim Brown of IDEO [0] fame, but as the OP explains has been extended and adapted since. I think it's a really good thing to consider earlier in your carrier, helping to enable you to be a better, rounder and more valu…
Other shapes have also been proposed:
X-shaped for leadership I-shaped for individual depth-skill without communication skills tree-shaped for a person with depth in many areas or branches of a field Multiple Mountains shaped (coined by Forrest Z. Shooster) for individuals with depth in overlapping several fields rather than a shallow depth in many or a singular depth in one field who specialize in the overlap between those fields
Γ- and Μ-shaped individuals (gamma and mu, respectively) have been described by Brittany Fiore in her ethnographic work of data science research communities to indicate people with supporting strengths in computationally- and software-intensive fields.[3][4]
Similarly, π-shaped skills (after the Greek letter pi) refer to "a broad mastery of general management skills atop a few spikes of deep functional or domain expertise".[5]
what is this MBA gobbledegook
Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)
#55I 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 training sounds absurd and forcing people switch roles for a sprint is worse. 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 persi…
I'm not sure that's "T shaped" as much as it is "cross functional", which can be done without requiring anyone to know about anything outside their silo, as long as someone crosses silos and communicates. That's more of a systems engineering model, where a specific role forms the bridge and only the bridge, and specialists form the teams. It's a very Aerospace model of doing business.
Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)
#56I 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…
TBH, familiarizing oneself with several subfields of a single field is still not very polymath-y though. Of course, all fields are just much bigger than they were in the 15th or 18th century, so this is more difficult if you want to be actually useful, but IMO being a real polymath still entails being knowledgeable of various disjoint subjects. Like poetry, marine biology, and systems programming.
And, of course, since software has been eating the world, domain knowledge about the field in which your software is actually used is one of the most valuable traits to have, because it matters very little how perfect and elegant your solution is if it is a solution to the wrong problem.
Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)
#57Because broad shoulders are attractive.
Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)
#58T-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…
I like to do JIT on a prototypes and then use the knowledge to fall into flow state when working on the real product.
Once that gets boring time for a new prototypes
Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)
#59I expected this to be about 3D modeling and default pose.
Well at least it wasn’t about the “This is my hole! It was made for me!” manga.
Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)
#60[Off topic] Honestly, I was expecting this to be about Gobekli Tepe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe#/media/File:...
Maybe I'm watching too many documentaries.