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Short fat engineers are undervalued

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Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#81

Post by edoceo »

netrus wrote: post #64
winter_blue wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew a senior software engineer who was in his 60s, who was short, fat (pot bellied), completely bald (or shaven), and had a large white beard . He also used to ruffle the feathers of HR. Once, when a woman from the talent acquisition team tried to give him generic instructions about conducting interviews, he told her “Lady, I don’t need all this, I’ve been doing this since before you were born”. (She was born in t…

Sometimes when people refuse to learn something new because they think they know better they are right, and sometimes they are wrong. Sadly it is difficult to know in which of these group you are, so it might be a good hedge not to refuse to listen to the young people. Even the most knowledgeable engineer can become a net negative quite easily.

Hubris right? Gets you twice, every time.

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#82

Post by sngz »

robertbalent wrote: post #19

Is it really true? A lot of companies are focusing on hiring "short fat" engineers. Especially companies having "dev ops" engineering model, where engineers must be able to work on all stages of the product lifecycle - from design, development, testing, to deployment and operations.

yes it's true. as someone who's a generalist, every interview I've been to asks me very specific things about one programming language / tech stack. Even though I'm underpaid, I enjoy continuing doing my "short fat" engineering at my current job getting to touch many technologies and focusing on solving the problems at hand rather than specializing in one.

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#83

Post by keybored »

renerthr wrote: post #58
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 think it goes more the other way around. Successful people prefer to look attractive, so they take the necessary steps to achieve that. Elon M would be an example, I guess. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7378972

Yes, we all know that time when Musk decided to grow taller.

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#84

Post by dvtrn »

alexjplant wrote: post #62
robertbalent wrote: post #19

Is it really true? A lot of companies are focusing on hiring "short fat" engineers. Especially companies having "dev ops" engineering model, where engineers must be able to work on all stages of the product lifecycle - from design, development, testing, to deployment and operations.

> Especially companies having "dev ops" engineering model, where engineers must be able to work on all stages of the product lifecycle - from design, development, testing, to deployment and operations. This is what DevOps is _supposed_ to be but often not what "DevOps Engineers" are hired to be. In my experience most companies hire DevOps Engineers that are one of two things: 1) Sysadmins that also know Python and wh…

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.

Nice little coincidence seeing your comment suggesting exactly the same thing. Of course, google just calls those people “SREs”...which in the best of worlds is a “Site Reliability Engineer”, in past orgs though it’s really meant “Sometimes Responsible for Everything”

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#85

Post by annoyingnoob »

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.

Its interesting that a history of doing hard things is less important than it once was at interview time. You still have to prove that you can do hard things.

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#86

Post by treis »

nullspace wrote: post #23

In my career, I have met exactly one short fat engineer with >5yrs of exp that I was impressed by. That person is now a Product Manager at a FAANG company (albeit PM-ing highly technical stuff). I bring this up because I think there is a very good analogy to the point that the author is making and the distinction between PM and Engineers. Broadly put, PM's are good at figuring out the theta, and Engineers are good at…

>met exactly one short fat engineer with >5yrs of exp that I was impressed by

I'll go so far as to say that they don't really exist. 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.

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#87

Post by TameAntelope »

nullspace wrote: post #23

In my career, I have met exactly one short fat engineer with >5yrs of exp that I was impressed by. That person is now a Product Manager at a FAANG company (albeit PM-ing highly technical stuff). I bring this up because I think there is a very good analogy to the point that the author is making and the distinction between PM and Engineers. Broadly put, PM's are good at figuring out the theta, and Engineers are good at…

If you're a "short and fat" engineer, and you know it, it's very hard to stay that way, and also stay in engineering. Either you become a T-shaped engineer, or you move out of engineering to apply your broad-but-shallow knowledge in ways that elevate others (e.g. PM work).

"Short and fat" is a transitionary state. Staying there is just logistically hard, not to mention handicapping in situations where being deeper in one specific area would help.

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#88

Post by tenarchits »

pb7 wrote: post #3

The article itself isn't about this but one could theorize that the headline taken literally is also likely true.

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/

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#89

Post by JoblessWonder »

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…

Don't take this the wrong way, but I feel like you are undervaluing short fat engineers. :)

The article isn't saying that specialists aren't valuable. In fact is says the opposite: "If you know exactly what you need, and you need it right now, choose depth." It is just saying that perhaps the short fat engineer would be the one who realizes they need an OpenGL specialist on the team in the first place because the graphics are hitting a bottleneck and slowing down everything else. The author is merely pointing out that in the nascent portion of projects their contributions are, at times, under valued.

Re: Short fat engineers are undervalued

#90

Post by hinkley »

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…

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 get bored and wander off, at which point all the mistakes they avoided will just be explored in their absence. Unless they built up people, documentation and processes to take over the work.

My read of Kernighan's Law, back-ported onto my own philosophy, is that most of the time you don't want the most capable person working on a solution. You want the 2nd or 3rd most capable person on it, have them reach consensus with the other two. Maybe 10% of your code should be as clever as you can manage. Most of the rest should be so boring that only the junior people find it interesting. The bottom rungs of an orchard ladder everyone is trying to climb.

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