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What Is a Wildcard Person?

wildcardpeople.com

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Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#231

Post by dinkumthinkum »

quartesixte wrote: post #109
1123581321 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see what you are saying. I think that some people are good at trying everything when they are alone or the one in full control, and others are good at operating dynamically within a larger organization or a situation not of their choosing. So I think we need two terms and I think wildcard/free electron applies more to the person operating inside an organization or community.

Right. The wildcard/free electron I have observed and worked closely with the most has an almost physical allergic reaction to power and control. They throw themselves headfirst into fires and spit out solutions that work and endure, but are horrified of holding any official title beyond their nebulous, job descriptionless role. Receiving public credit also makes them recoil in horror — so long as 1) the CEO duly com…

I feel like this is describing a class in an RPG. I’m not sure people fit into these boxes so well. I’m not sure I have seen many of these ruthless mercenaries in the wild.

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#232

Post by klysm »

tormeh wrote: post #151
klysm wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something I’ve seen repeatedly is that chaos bringers are expected to fit into the consistent results bin in a rigid process when it might be more effective to lock them in a room with a hard problem for a month.

I’d expect adhd peeps to work best in a rapidly shifting environment full of emergencies. Being locked in a room for a month with the same problem is not my idea of a fun time.

If the problem is super interesting and involves a bunch of learning and novel problem solving, it would be a pretty fun time for me. Perhaps just for two weeks though, a month might be too long.

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#233

Post by dinkumthinkum »

tz18 wrote: post #65
braingenious wrote: post #9

“What is a person with somewhat varied skills??” I scream as I smash my debit card number into my keyboard to buy a domain for this concept that I’ve just invented. I smile slyly at my partner, a meth pipe.

Honestly, will these people ever stop huffing their own farts? This site is so full of itself sometimes. Are all of you guys really THAT engineer to the degree that you act like it on this site? Are we really going to celebrate a new marketing term to sell the idea of knowing more than one thing back to engineers? Like, hey, what if, hey maybe what if it was a good idea for people to know more than just the very narr…

You seem pretty worked but it’s not clear what you actually want. You kind of hooked on this thing about generalists / specialists to make this big point but I’m not sure what it is.

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#235

Post by nye2k »

lokimedes wrote: post #23

This is me, this is how I generate value as a full-blown ADHD case. I wonder if there’s a correlation? To add credibility in a corporate setting I have somehow achieved a fearsome combination of Physics PhD, MBA and 25 years of wildcard software development / entrepreneurship. That, combined, legitimizes why I’m allowed to be the wildcard. How have you others managed to be this deep generalist in a specialist’s world…

This was my immediate thought also - as I embrace my ADHD as success, not failure. After 10 years of web design/dev work I found myself spending more time in SQL than design and left to study classical animation. At 20 years I have managed to cobble together a useful, successful, maybe even desirable wildcard career in edu kids media, collecting accolades along the way that I couldn't care less about.

I like to think of my ADHD as the superpower of subconscious thought. When I wrangle the focus, things percolate quickly and I will create very interesting work at an incredibly high production value. This happens both alone and with a team and I believe it to be related to a wide and varied skillset--master of none.

Success happens so frequently that I have been able to learn some conditions to gain focus so results are fairly repeatable. My work gets a lot of eyeballs, folks see this value and will put me on new projects or simply come to me for validation of their ideas.

Still, I'm not the easiest person for neuro-typicals to work around, and after 20 years that is unlikely to change much. I keep my job because I'm always needed - I can always do the thing that needs to be done, or help a team to deliver. It helps that I'm also kind, and fun to be around. But, as projects mature I am eventually phased out for a larger team of stable redundancy and I have to cope with losing the thing that I built and love.

My joy comes with learning something very new and very challenging, casting light on the unknown by diving head-first before others think. My career is successful because I am skilled and able to take on the risks that others are afraid to spend the time or resources on. I am somehow already prepared, interested, and on staff.

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#236

Post by Slow_Hand »

YurgenJurgensen wrote: post #225
ajkjk wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't ignore all the difficult ones. But fine. Bricklaying is a few days to learn on the job, tops. Conning a ship almost certainly means captaining a boat which takes some experience for sure, probably a few months. Basic first aid, including setting a bone, is a week long course. Etc. I can't imagine why you went to the trouble of trying to make them all sound like complicated many-year projects, but it's a ridi…

Are you seriously suggesting that Robert A. Heinlein, former naval officer, wouldn't care about the distinction between a ship and a boat? And you still ignored the two most difficult ones.

If you want anyone to address the meat of your question simply state what you believe to be the two hardest tasks instead of being vague and making people guess. The conversation would be better for it.

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#237

Post by PainfullyNormal »

d0100 wrote: post #228
mclightning wrote: post #134

I was that guy for some 5-6 years in earlier years of my career. It doesn't pay well. Job security is non-existent. You won't get visa sponsorships. Your only way out is to build your own startup/product. It is too far out of the regular career spectrum, and you face even open criticism in interviews for this sometimes. So, I stopped. I am an expert Frontend Engineer now. I get senior roles without even a proper inte…

> I am an expert Frontend Engineer now I wonder how much you know more than a Fullstack Engineer? I ask because I am a generalist "fullstack" and want to know what kind of things an "expert" should know in the frontend that would make them unable to do fullstack personal projects From my POV, unless you are working on very new tech like WebGl, Wasm, etc, everything else frontend is pretty much resolved. Would "expert…

I'm also interested in this, but I'm more interested in what you need to say and do to convince other people you're an expert.

> everything else frontend is pretty much resolved

Has it? The technologies will change again. Pretty soon, if I have to guess. What's valuable here are the concepts that are universally applicable and have been since it was called client programming in the 70s: state management, rendering, API integrations, architecture.

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#238

Post by rolenthedeep »

uwagar wrote: post #227
rolenthedeep wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heinlein was an American naval officer just after WWI and right before WWII. At that time it wasn't called "bias" it was simply "being American". That quote was written in a very different world.

is it still being american?

Depends who you ask, but the percentage of people who would answer "no" is significantly higher than it was 50 years ago.

I don't have any data, but my guess is it's approaching 50%. A lot of Americans are pretty pissed about our military for a variety of reasons.

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#239

Post by ryandrake »

YurgenJurgensen wrote: post #175
BlackFly wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the idea and the debate is as old as history. I prefer the quote from Heinlein, "Specialization is for insects." Because actually, if you look at well run organizations, everybody needs to be a generalist to some degree. You don't just work in a silo and ignore every other aspect of what your organization does, otherwise you produce deficient solutions that your colleagues in their own siloes need to work around…

It's an evocative quote, but it's also nonsense. The selection of skills is a bit scattershot, but let's look at some examples: "butchering a hog" takes a year to learn, well, butchery to a professional standard, because someone who can butcher hogs but not cows sounds awfully 'specialised', some places even say that a butchery apprenticeship takes 24 months. (And I personally wouldn't trust an unqualified butcher to…

The point of the quote is not that those specifically called-out skills are more valuable to know than other skills. The author could have picked 21 entirely different skills to list, and the point is exactly the same. He's also not saying people should have PhD-level knowledge or master-level training in every skill they know--quite the opposite.

Re: What Is a Wildcard Person?

#240

Post by quartesixte »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #231
quartesixte wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. The wildcard/free electron I have observed and worked closely with the most has an almost physical allergic reaction to power and control. They throw themselves headfirst into fires and spit out solutions that work and endure, but are horrified of holding any official title beyond their nebulous, job descriptionless role. Receiving public credit also makes them recoil in horror — so long as 1) the CEO duly com…

I feel like this is describing a class in an RPG. I’m not sure people fit into these boxes so well. I’m not sure I have seen many of these ruthless mercenaries in the wild.

Ah sorry should have made more clear — this was just about this one specific person.

I haven’t met many people like them either. I have also not met many ruthless corporate mercenaries. This particular person might be an edge case (they also retired at age 40…while living a pretty upscale lifestyle).

So it’s possible to be a wildcard and be wildly successful, contrary to the statements here. Just a helluva lot harder.

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