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Everybody is saying both / be T-shaped. There is no free lunch though. You can't have it both ways. If you choose both that means you are going less deep or le

Everybody is saying both / be T-shaped. There is no free lunch though. You can't have it both ways. If you choose both that means you are going less deep or less wide than you could have gone had you picked one. That may seem obvious but from my experience it is not. Closely related to how we engineers often give unrealistic, overly optimistic work time estimates . Beware!

gradys 10y ago
The T-shape metaphor is imperfect. In reality, going deep doesn't mean digging down into an isolated vertical of knowledge. Knowledge is a graph. To gain more knowledge in one topic, you've got to traverse the graph, following edges most likely to lead you to a better understanding of the topic. Inevitably, during this traversal, you'll encounter many adjacent topics. The deeper you go, the more adjacent topics you'll encounter. Some amount of breadth comes as a natural side-effect of depth. There are few topics where chasing depth will lead you into a totally isolated subgraph for the simple reason that topics that don't relate to other topics tend to be less useful to study.
- startupdiscuss 10y ago
  But then -- to bayonetz point -- are we really giving any negative advice? Just learn? There are only so many hours in the day. Is there anything we are recommending against?
  - rwallace 10y ago
    There are two things we are recommending against. 1. Sinking too far into a rut, getting to the point where you have a narrow specialty (fine) but identify with it and are uncomfortable with even thinking about anything outside it. 2. Trying to do everything. With all due respect to Heinlein, specialisation exists for good reason. There will be zillions of worthwhile things you never learn much about because you can't spare the time, and that's okay. In other words, being I-shaped is a problem when circumstances change, and being rectangular is a fool's errand; that's the context in which we recommend being T-shaped.
Spooky23 10y ago
It depends on you, your proclivities and what you want out of life. The value of the "T" depends. If you have real strong expertise in areas like identity or some security practices, those skills are super valuable and you really need a great deal of expertise to even know that the super deep sub-disciplines are. Unless you chose unwisely, a "T" skill set in most things means you'll have a 95th percentile or higher income with a two income family. IMO, if you "go deep", and make yourself a world-class expert in something you should be deciding to be a contractor and know who the customers are who care. FTEs with deep expertise get screwed in terms of compensation and screwed worse if the winds change and you have to leave involuntarily -- nobody will believe that you are actually an expert if you were an employee. If you want to be and employee, going deep is a waste of time.

gradys 10y ago

The T-shape metaphor is imperfect. In reality, going deep doesn't mean digging down into an isolated vertical of knowledge. Knowledge is a graph. To gain more knowledge in one topic, you've got to traverse the graph, following edges most likely to lead you to a better understanding of the topic. Inevitably, during this traversal, you'll encounter many adjacent topics. The deeper you go, the more adjacent topics you'll encounter. Some amount of breadth comes as a natural side-effect of depth. There are few topics where chasing depth will lead you into a totally isolated subgraph for the simple reason that topics that don't relate to other topics tend to be less useful to study.

startupdiscuss 10y ago
But then -- to bayonetz point -- are we really giving any negative advice? Just learn? There are only so many hours in the day. Is there anything we are recommending against?
- rwallace 10y ago
  There are two things we are recommending against. 1. Sinking too far into a rut, getting to the point where you have a narrow specialty (fine) but identify with it and are uncomfortable with even thinking about anything outside it. 2. Trying to do everything. With all due respect to Heinlein, specialisation exists for good reason. There will be zillions of worthwhile things you never learn much about because you can't spare the time, and that's okay. In other words, being I-shaped is a problem when circumstances change, and being rectangular is a fool's errand; that's the context in which we recommend being T-shaped.

Spooky23 10y ago

It depends on you, your proclivities and what you want out of life. The value of the "T" depends. If you have real strong expertise in areas like identity or some security practices, those skills are super valuable and you really need a great deal of expertise to even know that the super deep sub-disciplines are. Unless you chose unwisely, a "T" skill set in most things means you'll have a 95th percentile or higher income with a two income family. IMO, if you "go deep", and make yourself a world-class expert in something you should be deciding to be a contractor and know who the customers are who care. FTEs with deep expertise get screwed in terms of compensation and screwed worse if the winds change and you have to leave involuntarily -- nobody will believe that you are actually an expert if you were an employee. If you want to be and employee, going deep is a waste of time.