if I hold my arms up, i'm T shaped.
If I'm going to be honest, at first I did think that this was going to be about why humans are morphologically shaped the way we are.
Why T-shaped people? (2018)
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Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)
#92I 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…
Having worked on both sides of the divide, I can say it's sadly common for back-end devs to underestimate the complexity of front-end development and discount the advice and opinions of their front-end colleagues. I've even seen scenarios where back-end devs were allowed to dictate standards to their front-end peers just because they had more seniority in the company.
Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)
#93I mistakenly thought this was about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-pose (apparently NSFW) in 3D graphics.
Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)
#94I 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…
Well if you interpret it as "do completely different jobs of different teams" of course it doesn't work.
It makes sense in single team context, say one person being very good at SQL but rest of the team having some basics will mean most of the "simple" tasks related to can be done by anyone instead of shoving everything onto expert.
Or say having just enough frontend skill that backend team can create their own internal admin panel for a service without involving frontend/UX in it and paying communication tax.
Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)
#95[deleted]
Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Well the team obviously wasn't thinking about a lot of things.
But it had nothing to do with an open channel. Everyone was literally sitting next to each other. But my point at the end was that it doesn't solve anything because nobody even thinks to ask in the first place.
Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)
#97Maybe 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.
This comment reminds me of a great article I read ages ago and had to track down. When you're deeply focused in one area, you're most keenly aware of all the aspects of that area that you aren't an expert in. For example, I consider myself to be a complete novice at relational DBs, but from the perspective of your example truck driving, drilling, construction working, mechanic, I might as well be an expert. I guess it's important to keep in mind the scope domains that you're considering for any given situation.
https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ (might not be the original source of the idea though)
Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)
#98In my career I often found myself thrown into a situation where I have no expertise whatsoever. That was always a little anxiety inducing.
How is this white midwesterner who knows only English going to handle displaying Japanese ruby text in epubs? Or implement the epub table of contents (TOC) for vertical Japanese? I didn't even know Japanese ruby existed before the task of implementing it landed in my lap.
Thanks top the web, googling, and a few coworkers with a little expertise (and CoreText on Mac OS) was how. I am by no means an expert now in Japanese ruby, or even CoreText, but I love how I am a lot less ignorant about these things too.
Ignorant of PDF until I was told to support it more deeply in Cocoa (Mac OS).
Ignorant of color theory and color management until I was pulled into the ColorSync team.
Ignorant of image metadata, XMP, or even XML parsers until image metadata support also landed in my lap.
Display prefs, display calibrator, Common Cartridge.... It's funny how many things land in your lap when you are a kind of "gofer" for your team, ha ha.
Each time, as I said, I felt disoriented, anxious, worried I would be able to implement the feature. But after so many weeks of struggling, and eventual success, I have come to treasure those experiences.
Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)
#99I 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…
This comment is a classic example of misreading the philosophy behind T-Shape people. T-Shape or 'paint drip' people is a term used for generalists who have acquired a diverse skillset during their career and how these generalists have an upper hand over a specialist in certain domains. The book Range by David Epstein also goes deep into this philosophy. A single anecdote of a misguided manager ruining it for their t…
I'm here to bump the book Range but for me T-Shape theory is more about Tetris for Teams so you have overlap at the conversation level and enough depth in the direction(s) of travel. My hot take is Management Theory by 2D Shape Jargon is going to find its stride so in a few years xyzGPT will be classifying us as hyper-dimensional dodecahedrons anyway. /s.
Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)
#100I 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 spent most of my career until mid 2020 at small companies. I was “good enough” at pre-sales, writing SOWs, project management, designing and developing your typical enterprise online or analytics/ETL solution, “polyglot persistence”, “DevOps” at least if you gave me an empty AWS account and admin access, I could create your “Well Architected”, “12 factor architecture”, etc.
Fast forward to 2020, when I went from a 60 person startup to working at AWS in Professional Services where I do the same type of enterprisey things as a billable consultant, I realized that in most of those areas, there are plenty of people who can run circles around me.
But, my “specialty” is that I am a generalist and can go into your typical enterprise and talk to everyone in the organization from sales, to finance, to security, to developers, to the infrastructure people, etc and I’m self aware enough to know what I don’t know and know when I need to bring in a specialist.