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Why T-shaped people? (2018)

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Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)

#101

Post by thrashh »

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…

Someone becomes T-shaped because they’re interested in the things that would make them T-shaped in my opinion

I think it can be beneficial to show people where you can start learning a new subject but they have to choose to learn

Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)

#102

Post by wellanyway »

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…

I woukd quote our sexual misconduct document and leave the training.

Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)

#103

Post by batmansmom1 »

I remember this from back when the Valve employee handbook was released:

https://jgreaser.wordpress.com/2015/06/26/valves-t-shaped-mo... https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployee...

I've always wondered if they were the ones to come up with this or if it was taken from somewhere else?

Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)

#104

Post by kkfx »

jon-wood wrote: post #8
kkfx wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A thing have changed starting from few years ago: while before people prize specialization as the best route for anyone now some start prizing generic vast knowledge. This shift is so far limited but important, it means some have realized too many have lost the big picture and we need it to keep anything working well...

Any reasonably large organisation probably needs both types of person. There’ll be the deep problems that require a true specialist to deal with (Netflix blogs about optimising network transfer spring to mind here), and people with broad experience who can bring that to bear on new problems, put together prototypes, and understand which specialisms to involve as it develops. There’s huge value in understanding the en…

That's sure, but I mean the "general adage", most current narrative is "specialized is good, cool, the way to go, nobody want to be generic, ..." while actually all rulers, broad leaders etc need to be generic.

To seems like keep crying "do not be rich! It's bad!" and now I see something I call a small reversing trends where more and more sources start stating "we need more generic/wildcard/T-shaped/$choose-a-label-not-to-say-generic-directly". I call it "a bit late, but still good".

Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)

#105

Post by wellanyway »

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 reads like nobody involved knows about code review and just commits straight to master. 'Hey this sql is fine but slap an index on name field' is not some shocking development if you just had three rounds of refactoring of a piece, let's say CSS. Or Java.

Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)

#106

Post by switchbak »

evanwise wrote: post #92
krisoft wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I just had the same in the opposite direction (to an extreme degree, hand waving away an enormous amount of complexity). The blade of Dunning Kruger cuts both ways.

Though what you describe sounds awful too. Hopefully with the recent era of tooling and discipline on the frontend side, we'll see less of that.

Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)

#107

Post by switchbak »

hef19898 wrote: post #84
pclmulqdq wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, becaus…

I've got a background in Agile consulting (yeah, sorry), frontend work from way back in the day, and low-level systems and optimization work. None of this is factored into my current job, and I've lately been labeled the "database guy" ... when that's one of my newest and not particularly impressive competencies.

I still have yet to find a way to manage external perception of my abilities to even a minimal degree. Very draining.

Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)

#108

Post by scarface74 »

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 also thought I was very good at a lot of different areas.

And then I started working at a company where there are actually people who are considered some of the best in the world in every conceivable area that I thought I was good at.

Every week there is an announcement about a new service or feature at AWS. For instance, my specialty is supposedly “serverless”. I didn’t know that Fargate (serverless Docker) supported Windows for over a year.

Even if you think more generically like front end development, there is always something new.

Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)

#109

Post by satvikpendem »

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 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'm more so talking about the fundamental concepts of these topics, such as implementing an OS or database from scratch, rather than the latest trends in the fields. If there is a major trend then I'll look into it. Taken that way, it doesn't take as much time as you might expect, since it's not about learning and using the latest libraries, it's about things that haven't changed for 50 years, like database ACID transactions.

Re: Why T-shaped people? (2018)

#110

Post by satvikpendem »

rzmd wrote: post #47
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?

Teach Yourself CS [0] is a great resource. For other fields, I just went through courses on Coursera, MIT OpenCourseWare, etc or the various recommended books and followed along. For example for learning about interpreters, I'm using the book Crafting Interpreters [1] and doing it in Haskell, learning it from the book Haskell Programming From First Principles [2].

If you go to any school's CS degree program and go through their list of courses, you can basically do them for free by watching the videos and doing the assignments. This is what Scott Young did [3].

[0] https://teachyourselfcs.com

[1] https://craftinginterpreters.com

[2] https://haskellbook.com

[3] https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/myprojects/mit-challenge-2/

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