One hidden risk with adopting industry leading technology at smaller businesses is that you unintentionally select for tools that favor specialists, and that is harder to hire for and less useful for an early or small business.
Short fat engineers are undervalued
201–210 of 269 posts
Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience, "narrow" professionals tend to heavily overestimate what they bring to the table, which makes them not very hard to outcompete.
Switching technology is easy, switching domain is hard. You can't specialize in a technology, that is just nonsense, you specialize in a domain. Or several domains if they are simple enough. Like, the typical needs of a web product are simple enough that you master how to do the database, back end and front end. You wont be able to do the back end or database at Google scale, but you can master doing them at typical…
I think one person can understand the backend at google scale. You shouldn't LARP solving problems you don't actually have (it's stupid to pay those costs, especially when the google state of the art isn't really that good) but you can still understand it.
- Modern hardware realities (nearby network faster than disk they say, memory of all sort slow relative to CPU). My mental model is the good ol' hydrolic analogy, but with molasses. Wires are slow, components are hardly slower. Flash is slower still. Maybe also think of the machines being close relative to length of wires in CPU and mollases properties.
- DB arch and similar. Well, if everything is molasses synchronizations is clearly hard. Rather than think about nifty hacks in isolation, think about what is the "business logic"'s actual expectations of synchronization. Remember financial settlement is the original example solution for this sort of thing, long predating computers.
Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
>PM's are good at figuring out the theta, and Engineers are good at the r. I'm only familar with the options definition of theta and the reproductive strategy of r. Could you expand? Something like, PM's are good at long term (e.g. our product needs this feature, then this feature) and Engineers are good at fine detail (e.g. the feature should work like this)?
Theta is the angle, r is the radius. Thus PMs are good at figuring out in what direction to concentrate their effort, and then the engineers make progress in that direction. That's how I interpreted it at least.
Aha, thank you! I understand that as similar to what I tried to articular.
Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued
#204Why would a generalist be wiser than somebody who is able to go into depth and understand the ugly details of a project? That is what the T-shaped thinking is about. Elon Musk is a great example who is able to answer deep technical questions on many subjects, and I think he needs people who understand their own project deeply, not ,,short fat'' engineers.
Elon Musk is a hack, and his "deep technical" answers are either pre-prepared or appear deep and technical to people outside of the fields.
Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued
#205I always thought pi "shaped" knowledge is best, as it helps you build networks interlocking like proteins.
Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued
#206None of these things exist. A taxonomy of three kinds is entirely inadequate to describe the potential of anyone working today. These sorts of quick fix mental models are pretty poisonous. There are literally recommendations for all three saying how useful they are. This is some of the dumbest snake oil to infect software development.
The point isn't a taxonomy of 3 types but the layout in two axes - breadth and depth of expertise. Those are quite real and useful to think about when considering hiring or your own career development.
Right but no one actually measures what real distributions look like. They just invent some shapes with stories attached they like. Then the misguided try to lump people into them.
Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued
#207Earlier 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.
- If you become senior manager of an existing project, learn from the rest of the team!
- If you end senior manager of a new project, you probably shouldn't also be new at the company period, but at the very least, you start with something there is expertise somewhere on the team on.
- New tech, new team, new org all at once: that's a terrible idea. The project shouldn't happen, or you shouldn't be the sole senior manager on it.
All that said, if we have some team continuity across the industry, that should allow enough on boarding time for everyone to a be a non-pidgeonholed generalist. Just because there are derivative bounds doesn't mean we can't abandon change and pigeon-hole people in myopic specialist roles.
Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued
#208The most successful engineers, to me, seem to be the ones who rise about the lower levels of technology and abstract out minor details.
They understand what the technology in question can do and cannot do. They know what other technologies can be paired and cannot be paired with the current one and they understand the performance, development, deployment and maintenance aspects of all the combinations.
They can then design applications or platforms, learning as they go.
Take, for example NodeJS. Ryan knows what V8 is capable of, knows what it's not capable of outside the browser sandbox, and built himself an alternate sandbox. The implementation details, while complex, are minor in the grand scheme of things.
Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued
#209The point that "on a long enough time line, wisdom is always more valuable than knowledge" is pretty irrelevant to tech companies. They hire engineers to get stuff done quickly - not slowly gather "wisdom". The average tenure at a tech company continues to be a few years. Also, I've noticed that entry-to-mid level jobs are great for "short and fat" engineers, but once you start aiming for senior (or higher) level IC…
I tend to see a lot of highly promoted "short and fat" principal engineers and other internal thought leaders who lack depth. In fact the career path seems to top out if you prefer being an expert in something rather than jack of all trades and able to talk about any subject.
I suspect they don't lack depth so much as have depth in other technologies which aren't used. If they don't want to stay on the treadmill of building expertise in the next new thing, then they move up to jobs based on the wisdom they have accumulated instead.
I have also seen a lot of people hired in at high pay due to their laser-like career focus and years of experience in just the right area, who turned out to embody the peter principle. They lacked the brains and creativity to do anything new and still get stuck when a new twist comes up. Meanwhile I know generalists who are great at figuring things out, and got bored when they had more or less mastered the technology so them move on to a new challenge.
Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued
#210For further in-depth reading, I recommend the book "Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World". It explores the generalist vs specialist dichotomy within various fields (e.g. sports, music, engineering) and compares the successes and contributions between the two. As you might guess from the title, the book reaches a very similar conclusion - for spaces involving unstructured problem solving such as engineering, breadth lends itself better to creativity and achieving breakthroughs.