Short fat engineers are undervalued • Hacker News Board

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#131

Post by zabzonk » Fri, Feb 12, 2021, 11:56 PM UTC

wutbrodo wrote: post #118

zabzonk wrote: post #65

How about "tall and fat" (square)? I'd consider myself fairly expert in C and C++, SQL, Windows programming, UNIX/Linux in general, Delphi and a few other technologies, in that quite a few people have paid me for writing important applications using them, teaching them and writing about them.

It seems pretty clear that the model is relative to "total surface area". What you call a "tall and fat" square may be "short and skinny" relative to someone else's bar, but now we're just talking about total level of skill, which isn't really relevant.

I am saying you can be highly skilled in multiple technologies. Do you disagree with that?

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#132

Post by keybored » Fri, Feb 12, 2021, 11:57 PM UTC

smnrchrds wrote: post #123

keybored wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fatness and lack of stature was the original topic.

But the comment you replied to talked about attractiveness in general.

Here’s the comment that that one was a reply to:

> I believe there is ample research showing height and attractiveness (one could reasonably consider weight to be one determining factor in attractiveness) do play a factor in career success, compensation, and selection for leadership.

Look, only about obesity and height (and mainly height). To which they replied:

> I think it goes more the other way around. …

Which makes no sense because no one ever mentioned hair, so that can’t be used as a direct counter-argument to a comment about research on height.

Are we gonna continue this? This is enough for me.

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#133

Post by pcstl » Sat, Feb 13, 2021, 12:02 AM UTC

treis wrote: post #124

pcstl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also the strategy I tend to take. Strong, broad fundamentals so I can quickly pick up specifics on the job.

IMHO, I just don't buy this. Every piece of technology has its own set of quirks, pitfalls, and shortcuts. You can jump around from Rails to Spring to iOS to whatever and be a decent individual contributor. But to be a real Senior/Lead engineer that can be responsible for a project you've gotta have the in depth knowledge.

Sure, but the time it takes to hit diminishing returns wrt different technologies seems greatly underrated to me. I've seen many engineers stick with a single technology so long that they were just memorizing standard libraries instead of actually learning anything.

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#134

Post by solumos » Sat, Feb 13, 2021, 12:03 AM UTC

Looking at the author's background, it's easier to say generalists are undervalued when you're a freelancer/agency - you kind of have the freedom to work on projects for 3-6 months, punt them, and move on to the next.

When you're a bigger product organization, more specialized approaches can work better since you're better suited to find the right trade-off of "speed" vs "future-proofness".

This can backfire too though - many specialists can get lost in the weeds and over-engineer solutions that can cripple a business with maintenance costs simply because they want to increase their depth.

I think this entire contextualization is kind of ridiculous though. If you were to categorize short fat vs tall skinny vs T, you might see something like:

fullstack eng vs ML researcher vs backend engineer w/ ETL experience

The fact is that fullstacks _are_ utility players. I don't know that they're really at liberty to "take the helm" if they're not well-versed in the technology that differentiates the company (or team).

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#135

Post by purplecats » Sat, Feb 13, 2021, 12:05 AM UTC

Ericson2314 wrote: post #17

Do "height on demand". Constant abstract and compress the knowledge so you can ramp up in any area as needed. Really, this is why programming languages are my "home base" of expertise. It's the study of formal ideas and their communication.

> Constant abstract and compress

can you expand on this? i feel like i do this but not quite sure what you mean

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#136

Post by pcstl » Sat, Feb 13, 2021, 12:06 AM UTC

throwaway2245 wrote: post #74

pcstl wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People whose value lies in coordination often need to dabble in multiple fields. Think of a technical artist in a game company.

I would count coordination here as a deep technical skill, which requires a depth of study and/or experience. You are selling your coordination skills. It's the stick of the T.

I don't think there are too many people around who actually have no deep skill. That usually doesn't hold up too well in the job market.

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#137

Post by pcstl » Sat, Feb 13, 2021, 12:07 AM UTC

superbcarrot wrote: post #111

pcstl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also the strategy I tend to take. Strong, broad fundamentals so I can quickly pick up specifics on the job.

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.

In my experience, "narrow" professionals tend to heavily overestimate what they bring to the table, which makes them not very hard to outcompete.

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#138

Post by opportune » Sat, Feb 13, 2021, 12:09 AM UTC

This falls victim to the fallacy that everybody has a fixed number of points to allocate across skills. To torture the analogy, the reality is some people are huge squares and some are tiny slivers. Or a fat fork or some other weird shape. Basically, some people are just better than you at everything.

The other thing is that you often just need problem solvers where it doesn’t even matter how wide their experience is. You just need someone who knows the basics and is adaptable.

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#139

Post by jmchuster » Sat, Feb 13, 2021, 12:12 AM UTC

throwaway856437 wrote: post #103

jmchuster wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends, if your "master of many" list is all old technologies, or all new technologies.

How about the newest version of an old technology

I mean, all that really matters is if your list of technologies matches up with what the company currently uses and what they would aspirationally like to use in the future.

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#140

Post by bogwog » Sat, Feb 13, 2021, 12:13 AM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #119

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 b…

> 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 wonder what is the average time for an experienced engineer to transition into a different, but similar technology (like RoR -> Django) and be able to work productively in it.

It can’t be very long. Maybe 2 weeks? If you had a number, you could calculate the costs as part of a standard onboarding process. You’d just need to make sure that you hire someone who can demonstrate a willingness to learn the new thing.

This seems like it could be much cheaper than hiring an expert with the most years of experience in the particular combination of technologies in your stack, without compromising on quality.

And the perspective from someone with a breadth of knowledge is more likely to yield innovations that provide your company/project with a competitive advantage, compared to the expert that has been working on the same thing for many years.