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Short fat engineers are undervalued

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Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#221

Post by hackissimo123 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #34

"Junior in every department" really struck hard for me. I know just enough of basically everything to get by or as a starting point, but I lack that really deep knowledge that comes from using a small group of skills and tools for years. I feel that switching languages and frameworks and tools and OSes a bunch of times early in my career has really held me back. I don't mind supporting my team, what I don't like is h…

I'm in the opposite position; I've spent almost my entire five-year career focusing on one quite narrow tech stack and I'm good at it but I'm also sick of it and desperate to learn something new. I just changed jobs and I took a substantial pay cut for the chance to get professional experience in a new tech stack, which isn't ideal, but I really want to work with a new language and I don't know what else to do (there was no possibility of diversifying at my previous position.)

My point is that both the "short and fat" and "spikey" approaches have their pros and cons.

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#222

Post by smichel17 »

digikata wrote: post #76
annoyingnoob wrote: post #31

When I was younger I used to say that I was a jack of all trades, master of none. Many years later I feel like a jack of all trades, master of many. I no longer fit any of the profiles presented here.

I too have a broken comb profile. Every now an then I get to have some fun and add or extend a few teeth. But for the most part the skills let me work through most tangles pretty well.

Aah, I was looking for a word to describe this shape!

It's also what I consider myself. It's basically the result of being a generalist who is also willing to dive deep in order to solve a problem rather than stackoverflow my way to a workaround.

"Key-shaped" might be another word here, for someone who does have an area of focus, but not as extreme as a T shape. For example, someone who does full stack web dev with a frontend specialty, but not so focused on one particular frontend framework.

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#224

Post by edanm »

Swizec wrote: post #126
hinkley wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diversity. I've had a conversation with a few bosses where at some point I stopped to say words to the effect of, "It's like you think I expect everyone a the project to be like me. I don't." A project with just me would have problems too. But every project needs at least a couple of people who think like me, which we aren't accomplishing. This whole expert thing isn't tenable on a long term project. The expert will…

The ideal is an expert who sets up the project, builds the guard rails, creates the patterns and basically sets up a framework for everyone to use. Then they teach everyone how to use it and why And from then it’s a mentoring role. The expert spends more time PR-ing and adding to the framework than building end product features. They build stuff that touches every feature. Force multiplier is the game.

A lot of people seem against this approach, but I'm all for it.

In some sense, that's exactly how top level frameworks like react and Django get made- experts build them to make it easier for the rest of us to write the business-specific logic.

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#227

Post by agounaris »

This could be one of the reasons why tech interviews are awkward. Most of them are "optimised" for tall and fat engineers but what you actually get is "luck of the draw" T shaped engineers on random specialties that you may not even need, with the assumption that the T shaped engineer can be transformed on demand to a short and fat or tall and skinny.

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#228

Post by cryptica »

Everyone should aim to be T-shaped. The problem with 'tall skinny' engineers is that they can be extremely dangerous because:

- Their deep domain knowledge makes them sound a lot smarter than they are... Especially to non tech-savvy managers who don't know better. So they can be extremely persuasive in arguments. They only participate in arguments that they can win but their ability to constantly win those niche arguments gives them extra general credibility which is not deserved.

- They are excellent at implementing solutions within their narrow area of expertise but they tend to miss a lot of alternative solutions which may have been better. They could spend years working on a solution whose problem could have been solved much faster and more elegantly via a different solution which happens to lie outside of that individual's immediate domain of expertise. People who wield absolute top-of-the-range, world-class hammers but have no other tool in their toolbox have a very strong incentive to see and portray every problem as a nail.

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#229

Post by NotPavlovsDog »

hinkley wrote: post #187
Swizec wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ideal is an expert who sets up the project, builds the guard rails, creates the patterns and basically sets up a framework for everyone to use. Then they teach everyone how to use it and why And from then it’s a mentoring role. The expert spends more time PR-ing and adding to the framework than building end product features. They build stuff that touches every feature. Force multiplier is the game.

I’ve seen this crash and burn too often. If you have someone build something, and then explain it, you don’t find out until after if they are capable of explaining it. Just like a product MVP, you have to explain it as you go along. Without it, you start out with a multiplier but end with a divisor.

It could be described as about the bus factor, couldn't it? If an organization has a product, and that product is not retired, it should be sustainable by a team.

Lone points of breakage such as a single visionary or the mythic 10x-er are not optimal for the product if the unit taking care of the product is a team or several teams.

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#230

Post by politelemon »

w0mbat wrote: post #163
pb7 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I noticed at Microsoft that the tallest people always got promoted. It never made any sense to me - we weren’t playing basketball.

It may have been other factors that were involved in their promotions. Did they perhaps walk around with their arms out to the sides, in a T-esque shape?
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