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Why T-shaped people? (2018)

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Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)

#81

Post by pclmulqdq »

danielvaughn wrote: post #76
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 honestly don't think it's possible, and I don't think what you've described is a block shape. You can gain near-expertise in all the fields you mentioned, but true expertise means keeping up with the changes in your relevant area. If you commit to maintaining an expertise-level of knowledge in all the domains you mentioned, you're going to spend 75% of your life reading instead of doing. I like to say that my skill…

I think the best professionals I have worked with have been "wedge-shaped" people, not "T-shaped." People who are very familiar with their area, still intimately familiar with surrounding concepts, less familiar with things around that, and so on. Interestingly, I think this kind of person often gets mistaken for being "I"- or "l"-shaped.

Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)

#82

Post by AlbertoGP »

andrepd wrote: post #35
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…

>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 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 i…

It’s the usual hazing ritual, where the alpha manager gets to mark their territory.

Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)

#84

Post by hef19898 »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #81
danielvaughn wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't think it's possible, and I don't think what you've described is a block shape. You can gain near-expertise in all the fields you mentioned, but true expertise means keeping up with the changes in your relevant area. If you commit to maintaining an expertise-level of knowledge in all the domains you mentioned, you're going to spend 75% of your life reading instead of doing. I like to say that my skill…

I think the best professionals I have worked with have been "wedge-shaped" people, not "T-shaped." People who are very familiar with their area, still intimately familiar with surrounding concepts, less familiar with things around that, and so on. Interestingly, I think this kind of person often gets mistaken for being "I"- or "l"-shaped.

V shaped, or U shaped, people get mistaken for I shapes (man, how I love those management-sized oversimplified concepts, especially those putting people in boxes) when only one side of the U/V is used. Has all kinds of funny side effects, my personal favorite is when people realize, after having classified you as a I, that there is more to you. And then, using the biggest about faces possible, to recognize it, because of course once you are classified as something this cannot change.

Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)

#85

Post by fifilura »

krisoft wrote: post #62
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…

> We had backend devs doing frontend development with jQuery when we were using Vue. I believe you, but I have so many questions. Where the devs prevented from chatting with each other before starting to hammer on the keyboard? Were the backend devs not curious when they had to import a new dependency (jquery in this case)? Who did the code review? Having a backend dev do frontend is not different from a junior emplo…

Sounds like a very hostile environment. In my team we learn from each other and have fun doing so.

Some times managers do things to shake things up a bit. Some times they are right, some times they are wrong just like ordinary humans.

But what it takes to ruin the environment is not always a poor manager but just one stubborn grumpy senior dev who refuses to comply, and get some people along with him.

Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)

#86

Post by curioustrex »

I worked at a small company for 7 years and had to work with databases, server management, product ownership, front-end/back-end, styling etc. With only 4 developers, we all were expected to do everything. I always thought this was normal expectation for a full-stack developer.

Then I switched jobs to a bigger organization and became surprised by the number of people who claim to be full-stack but are uncable of developing an application from nothning.

Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)

#88

Post by vsareto »

Does anyone feel like this model is stretched really thin? Like, tech has a problem of easily identifying who's competent or not and has to do tech interviews to (try to) establish that.

I feel like establishing if someone is an expert or represents one of these shapes is going to be even harder.

Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)

#89

Post by fifilura »

crazygringo wrote: post #79
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…

Ha, I had the exact same experience a bit over a decade ago! Only it came from a total misunderstanding of what agile teams were supposed to be, the idea that anybody on the team should pick up any story they wanted to. So suddenly the graphic designer is writing HTML and CSS, the front-end developer starts writing SQL queries, and the product manager starts writing JavaScript. The experiment lasted about a month wit…

This sounds to me like your team did not think about what it means work together.

Particularly now with so much technology support from remote working you can just keep an open channel. As soon as you get stuck or want to ask something, you just share your screen and ask for some help. Not much more difficult than that.

Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)

#90

Post by mhss »

curioustrex wrote: post #86

I worked at a small company for 7 years and had to work with databases, server management, product ownership, front-end/back-end, styling etc. With only 4 developers, we all were expected to do everything. I always thought this was normal expectation for a full-stack developer. Then I switched jobs to a bigger organization and became surprised by the number of people who claim to be full-stack but are uncable of deve…

This is very common coming from small shops and moving to larger orgs. I am happy to have started my career gradually going from very small to medium to larger orgs. I think it's made me a much more well rounded dev. A lot of people that go straight into very large organizations have the disadvantage of narrowly focusing on a piece of software and often their learning is slower because of organizational complexity. At (good) smaller companies you have much more freedom to experiment and make mistakes, which is essential for learning fast.
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