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Short fat engineers are undervalued

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Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#231

Post by Consultant32452 »

yumraj wrote: post #93
whoisjuan wrote: post #9

The argument of specialist vs generalist is futile. They simple fit in distinct parts of the journey and evolution of a software product. Generalists are highly valuable for many types of orgs and projects especially nascent projects. But sometimes you need the precise output of a specialist to achieve something. If my business has a product that is highly dependent of let's say OpenGL, then an OpenGL specialist will…

As a generalist, I agree with bulk of what you're saying but at least my personal experience seems to echo the fact that generalists in general are undervalued since when someone asks a person "what can you do for me", a specialist always has a better and sharper answer than a generalist - and that makes all the difference. Personally I'll take a generalist any day since specialists suffer from the "if you only have…

My experience is that opposite. I'm a generalist and every company I've worked for is looking for generalists. If you're doing boring business work, which most of us are, you don't need to know every crevice of any technology. The majority of software development is not moving the needle on crypto or search algorithms, it's crud business apps and reporting.

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#232

Post by EvilEy3 »

A lot of sounds words without anything concrete. What is wisdom? How do you quantify it? Why "short far" engineer can have it and why T-shaped or "skinny" engineer can't have it? What makes someone "short and fat" valuable compared to other types?

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#233

Post by EvilEy3 »

edanm wrote: post #224
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.

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.

Wrong comparison. Django and React are products, if you were to say experts make it easier for us to write Django and React themselves that would better.

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#234

Post by ZephyrBlu »

centimeter wrote: post #94
tenarchits wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s a hot take on that front: “ The well-known association between height and earnings is often thought to reflect factors such as self esteem, social dominance, and discrimination. We offer a simpler explanation: height is positively associated with cognitive ability, which is rewarded in the labor market.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2709415/

I think it's definitely true that attractiveness indicators correlate with characteristics like intelligence. If you think about it, this shouldn't actually be that surprising; it would be silly if the factors that went into sexual selection had no correlation with survival-boosting traits.

What's the correlation coefficient though? Attractiveness may only be weakly correlated with intelligence, in which case it isn't very meaningful.

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#235

Post by EvilEy3 »

20thCB wrote: post #80
dangwu wrote: post #25

The 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…

Gotta laugh at the HN definition of "failure". Plenty of "short and fat" jobs provide a good career. Not everyone wants or needs anything else.

Gotta laugh at your definition of "good career". Plenty of "short and fat" jobs provide relatively failed career. Not everyone wants or needs anything else.

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#236

Post by ZephyrBlu »

treis wrote: post #176
bradlys wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure how you can spend 5 years and not learn at least one thing in depth. You'd have to rotate technologies every 6-12 months and there's not that many technologies. That's kinda how SV is these days though. It's very common for engineers to jump companies every 1-2 years for a long period of time and the companies very frequently undergo a shift in technologies while engineers are there. So, unless you joi…

You wouldn't say you have deep knowledge of JS & front end frameworks?

What do you classify as deep? I feel comfortable with JS and have a vague understanding of the internals of front end frameworks, but I wouldn't consider myself to have deep knowledge of either.

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#237

Post by ZephyrBlu »

adjkant wrote: post #199
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.

Interesting to see someone else with the same base and thoughts on it, and I'd highly recommend it! At a lower level, I've found a PL/Compilers background lets me switch/pick up languages quickly often and also helps even finding quirks as you can often guesstimate where the bodies are buried from design choices of the language. Also very helpful for architect type roles where you're picking what technologies to buil…

I feel like the 80/20 rule applies here. For most things you can probably learn 80% of the knowledge in 20% of the time it would take to learn 100%.

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#238

Post by tonyarkles »

edanm wrote: post #224
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.

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.

I'm half with you, and I see both sides.

When it's done well, I think it's a fantastic approach. I'm in a situation right now where I'm kind of that "expert". Not because it was planned that way, but because I was the only person on the project at the start. Now I've got a couple of young EEs working under me, and they do most of the development work while I sit in meetings for a good chunk of the day. I come in and help with the hard problems, but most of the day-to-day work is on them. It's working out great because it seems I got the structure relatively right (they've changed things a little bit as they've added new things I didn't think of, and I've reviewed and supported those changes)

The flip side is ${JOB-2} for me. It was a similar situation; an "expert" laid the foundations and then got pulled off to do other projects. There were two main differences between my current situation and that one:

- The infrastructure he put together was not great and full of footguns (e.g. accidentally implicitly double-encoding HTTP requests, bizarre cookie handling, etc)

- The code was hard to change because of how it was integrated, and the team didn't feel particularly empowered to fix it

- He was barely around (being assigned to something in a different building).

- He pushed back hard when people suggested that there might be problems with it and fixes required. Instead of facilitating and reviewing, he'd pop by occasionally, look at things that changed in his absence, and shit on them.

As I'm writing this, I'm reflecting on whether or not I'm contributing enough to the long-term development of this codebase, and I'm feeling relatively ok with the answer. Ultimately, this product is still my baby and whether or not it's successful is on me. Maybe that's the difference? I'm quite invested in the foundations I laid, and more than happy to help my team work through issues they find in it?

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#239

Post by treis »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #236
treis wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't say you have deep knowledge of JS & front end frameworks?

What do you classify as deep? I feel comfortable with JS and have a vague understanding of the internals of front end frameworks, but I wouldn't consider myself to have deep knowledge of either.

It's relative to your other skills. If you were a novice at everything and intermediate at JS then that's the trunk of your T.

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#240

Post by dvtrn »

alexjplant wrote: post #110
dvtrn wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some would see this as a cynical take, but I’ve experienced it so many times, and am feeling such burnout from it that I started pondering this week if I’d be better served applying directly to developer roles instead of anything to do with DevOps; seems no one but the most highest of highly functioning teams seem to grok it. Wonder if that makes me a cynic. Would a cynic admit to being a cynic? Probably. Anyway. Nic…

I don't think it's cynical at all... it's just an unfortunate reality. New things come along and people try to fit them into existing frameworks. Words' meanings evolve over time. People that don't actually do technical work often end up being responsible for placing and managing the people that do; sometimes their notions of roles and responsibilities don't align with ours. > I’ve experienced it so many times, and a…

I appreciate that. Best of luck to you as well.
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