Short fat engineers are undervalued

This still restricts you from getting many of the jobs that require narrow specialization. Specializing on the fly only works to a certain extent and only if you get the opportunity to do so in the first place.

Unless, to expand the metaphor to MMORPGs, you’re trying to solo (read: ramen startup) non-current content (read: disrupt an industry that has lagged in technical innovation, meaning you don’t need deep technical innovations but you do need broad agility).

The “short fat engineer” is the early-career nothing-to-lose startup founder, and that’s a vital role that is arguably correctly valued by our industry in recent decades.

> width is hedge - you don't get paid as much, but you can land a job quickly, because you can plug into any team

I generally like your model, but mobility is upstream of salary too. If you're very intentional about your career, mobility is the ace up your sleeve, letting you slot into the places you need to to maximize your current and future salary.

I've always been a pretty width-first engineer; it just fits my personality. But time and again, I've been able to open doors for myself because my established excellence in one area provided an "insurance policy" for teams to take a chance on me working in another (in-demand, specialized) area. After the first iteration or two, it's been a virtuous cycle, where I make lots of money with my established skill in the currently-hot thing and trade off a small portion of that to grow the skill in the next-to-be-hot thing.

Though perhaps this doesn't generalize well. I've been studying/working in AI for well over a decade and it's been a remarkable boom for my chosen field. Perhaps during the next AI winter, I'll have to face the depth/width trade-off a little more directly. But even in that case, it seems like width maximizes my expected salary.

Being judged attractive is a cultural thing that varies with time and place.

Being judged intelligent is also a cultural thing that varies with time and place.

Unless your culture is static for 20+ generations, don't expect much influence of it on evolution.

I think there's some dynamics at play here that obscure the situation.

First of all, there's a tendency for depth engineers to be more visible. But this is extreme; there's a handful of top names in StackOverflow for a tag like csharp or django, but that doesn't mean number 1000 in a given tag is an amateur at it, he's likely pretty good. Similarly, not everyone writes respected blogs, but the people who do tend to be ones who spent a heck of a lot of time in one niche. That doesn't mean you need a known blogger for your project.

Second, there's a tendency for hiring firms to want a dev fully trained in some vertical. This may sound sensible but often isn't. If you have some person who did a lot of work in RoR, but you have a Py/Django project, couldn't you expect him to get up to speed reasonably quickly? I think in a lot of cases, yes. Whether you'll be allowed to take that risk depends on the situation, and often you won't be. This works the other way too: a lot of devs will decide not to bother applying.

Third, diminishing returns. Like a lot of knowledge stuff, there's a sort of pareto principle here. You can learn most of anything in way under half the time to learn the whole thing, if that's even possible. If your project is not super specialized in one vertical, but still requires a lot of verticals, you benefit from having a guy who knows a lot about a lot of stuff.