7 ms·

Paint drip people, a successor to T-shaped people

185 points by KentBeck 10y ago

projectramo 10y ago
A lot of the attributes of "skilled people" could apply to all people. For instance: "Skilled people don’t plan their next focus area. Sometimes it seems completely unrelated to their previous focus area." So does this mean we should not plan our next focus area? What if someone is naturally inclined to plan their focus area, should they resist the urge?
- TearsInTheRain 10y ago
  An important caveat to not planning your next focus area is that you need to also always be exploring.
calcsam 10y ago
It's worth reading some of Keith's posts about systems and OS on Quora, some of the most interesting stuff I've seen on those topics: https://www.quora.com/profile/Keith-Adams https://www.quora.com/profile/Keith-Adams
TeMPOraL 10y ago
Damn it, they gave it a name. Now we can expect a lot of pop-psychology/business media bullshit about this concept for the coming decade. But yeah, this article generally captures my thoughts about the "T-shaped employee" thing, except that I personally want to be "bicycle-wheel shaped" human. First, a human, because my employment does not define me, and by "bicycle-wheel", for lack of better term, I mean many specializations in different areas that end up connecting with each other. As for the feasability of the "T-shaped" vs "paint drip", I think the latter is better - sure, ceteris paribus, you won't be able to put as much energy into many things as you can put in one, but I believe there are diminishing returns in specializations - and since the job market, like most markets, is terribly inefficient, you can probably get away with multiple specializations up until robots replace us all.
- munificent 10y ago
  > by "bicycle-wheel", for lack of better term, I mean many specializations in different areas that end up connecting with each other. This is the part that really resonates with me. I'm one of those people that naturally has way too many interests and hobbies than there are hours in the day. What I find time and again is that as I go far enough into some new interest, it starts to converge and connect to my other ones. I see similarities, or ideas where I can combine multiple interests to produce something that I couldn't make with just one of them. These days, I don't even really see separation between them. I'm just a big amorphous blob of all of this stuff, jumbled together. The jumbling together is way more important than any constituent part.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    > What I find time and again is that as I go far enough into some new interest, it starts to converge and connect to my other ones. I see similarities, or ideas where I can combine multiple interests to produce something that I couldn't make with just one of them. I've experienced the same thing. I used to joke that if you go far enough in any discipline, you'll end up in philosophy and abstract math. But it's more than that. Reality does not recognize specializations and boundaries. Reality is that "amorphous blob of all of this stuff, jumbled together". Drawing boundaries help us make sense of the world, but it's important to recognize boundaries are somewhat arbitrary and we're free to redraw them to fit our needs better.
    - jcater 10y ago
      Somewhat related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosoph... "Clicking on the first lowercase link in the main text of a Wikipedia article, and then repeating the process for subsequent articles, usually eventually gets one to the Philosophy article. As of May 26, 2011, 94.52% of all articles in Wikipedia lead eventually to the article Philosophy."
      - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
Xcelerate 10y ago
This goes along with the notion that the typical STEM person is interested in music/art/etc. about as much as the average person, but the typical Nobel Prize winner has a vastly higher interest in these alternative activities than the average person: http://priceonomics.com/the-correlation-between-arts-and-crafts-and-a http://priceonomics.com/the-correlation-between-arts-and-cra... I think the idea of being an "expert in a field" is becoming less valuable today than it used to be. Because there are so many experts in so many fields, they all share the same knowledge, ideas, and preconceptions, and thus the only way to make further progress is to incorporate original ideas from other fields. It goes along with the study that showed that interdisciplinary research has lower citations in the short-term, but many more citations in the long-term.
- gearhart 10y ago
  Historically, there seem to have been many more multi-disciplinary experts[1], it's simply the last few centuries where academic specialisation has been the norm. My general belief has always been that such things were driven by wealth inequality that allowed small numbers of people to dedicate themselves highly to the pursuit of general academia, which was out of reach for the general masses, and so they could be the leaders of many fields. (Although I will be the first to admit that I have little evidence for it, it simply seems a likely explanation given the historical context.) Potentially this is a re-incarnation of the same phenomenon - we've reached a point where somebody who is successful enough within their field is given immense freedom to explore other areas. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath plus anecdotal considerations of every Greek you can remember
  - bbctol 10y ago
    Honestly, I think another reason for so many ancient polymaths is that the fields themselves were less developed, and took less time to fully learn. I in no way want to put down Renaissance polymaths, who were tremendously impressive, but it simply takes less time to learn up to the cutting edge of mathematics or chemistry in 1660 than 2016.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
visakanv 10y ago
And so the circle of metaphors continues.
AndrewOMartin 10y ago
Also there are the people whose proficiencies follow a Gaussian distribution, otherwise known as "Normal people".
- Nacraile 10y ago
  I'm quibbling, but: I think the pareto distribution is more realistic than the gaussian. ("80% of your capability is allocated to 20% of your skills")
mathattack 10y ago
Interesting analogy. I think this captures the paths of creatives more than large company people. The T-model is great for consulting firms (like McKinsey who uses it) as well as conglomerates like P&G. Catching the interest of someone who can move from Operating Systems to compilers to website design is very different. The one thing I'd add to this is Paint Drip people tend to bring what they learned from one area to others. It's not so just disjointed and random "let's see what drips."
GCA10 10y ago
The "paint drip" approach is great for people who can pull it off, and the opening account of Keith Adams is inspiring. But that same approach to life also is a pretty apt description of low-focus, easily distracted people. I interviewed a job candidate once who had five masters degrees in unrelated fields. In the first five minutes, he sounded amazing. By about minute 15, I realized that his completion rate was very close to zero. And that made it hard for me to think of any job where he'd be effective. Diverse interests can be great. A commitment to life-long learning is inherently a huge plus. But cohesion (even if it's slow and accidental) feels like it needs to be the third part of the formula.
- KentBeck 10y ago
  Following the drip down the canvas is as important as moving the brush along (to stay with the metaphor).
yumaikas 10y ago
Very interesting metaphor. I would say that skilled peoe don't always plan their next project, but I do on occasion. I can strongly relate to having a lot of little side projects however. That seems to be where I learn the most stuff. I've even turned a lot of programming class projects into more ambitious side projects at times. I've also found that I often have to attempt a technology or system more than once before I get properly comfortable with it. It seems to have worked that way with Go, Phoenix/Elixir, Postgres, Love2d, and so on. My ability to do well in programming has more to do with many side hours spent researching and playing. New stuff takes a bit to settle in.
yumaikas 10y ago
Very interesting metaphor. I would say that skilled peoe don't always plan their next project, but I do on occasion. I can strongly relate to having a lot of little side projects however. That seems to be where I learn the most stuff. I've even turned a lot of programming class projects into more ambitious side projects at times. I've also found that I often have to attempt a technology or system more than once before I get properly comfortable with it. It seems to have worked that way with Go, Phoenix/Elixir, Postgres, Love2d, and so on. My ability to do well in programming has more to do with many side hours spent researching and playing. New stuff takes a bit to settle in.
bluetwo 10y ago
(To paraphrase the discussion)... All metaphors are wrong, but some metaphors are useful...
adamnemecek 10y ago
I guess this is a good place for me to ask how do people prioritize what to learn? Also what are your steps to learning something. My recurring issue is that most books/resources stop at this semi intermediate level, and then you are on your own. And figuring out how to progress is sometimes a bit too time consuming.
- JoelBennett 10y ago
  I'm not saying I'm a paint drip person, but for me it has been either what I'm interested in or what the current job requires. I never expected that I'd learn so much about growing corn, but that's what a current work project involves. On my own, I've been learning about ASP.Net Core 1.0 and JavaScript. For me, it's mostly about projects: I've got something in mind that I want to do, and there's a number of things that I need to learn to accomplish it.
- yumaikas 10y ago
  My strategy has been to think of a project to do, and then to try to match my tech to that. For instance, I picked up a bit of Love2D at LudumDare 34. Sometimes it works in reverse, I wrote a blog engine for junglecoder.com because I wanted to learn Go and the nature of running servers on the web better. But I have also had a lot of time my hands in the past, so YMMV. After a certain point, programming become more about logistics than individual effort. Another good way to prioritize what to learn, especially if you don't have any good ideas, is to follow where the money flows. If you want to make small contract websites, PHP is a decent choice (as much as I'd never choose it myself, but I have taste issues). C# is about the easiest way to get started on windows for just about anything. Elixir seems like a promising tech, especially with what Phoenix has on offer. Programming is time consuming in the real world, unless you're deep in your comfort zone, but that place has often already been automated anyway. This article seems to be a decent approach as well. I like a lot of what James Hauge has to say. http://prog21.dadgum.com/202.html http://prog21.dadgum.com/202.html
  - adamnemecek 10y ago
    Lol my issue isn't with lack of ideas its hat I have too many things I want to learn. But yeah project based learning is a given. I'm not actually talking about programming, I like to think of myself as somewhat experienced, but I'd like to get for example into 3D modeling and I'm not sure where to start.
franciscop 10y ago
A really good example of this would be TJ, who is known in the JS community as one of the authors of Express.js and has done a lot of Node.js-related stuff. But I follow TJ on twitter and he does a lot of unrelated work and has started a company recently [3]. Another good example would be Elon Musk, whom I think needs no introduction here. [1] https://github.com/tj https://github.com/tj [2] https://twitter.com/tjholowaychuk https://twitter.com/tjholowaychuk [3] https://apex.sh/ping/ https://apex.sh/ping/
- STRiDEX 10y ago
  We have an ongoing joke at our office where we ask if TJ wrote it. It being a package we're adding to our project. Was true more often in the past, but its still funny.
  - d0lph 10y ago
    Wasn't there a theory a while back that TJ was not even a real person, but a collective, simply because of how many things he was involved in?
    - jaredsohn 10y ago
      https://www.quora.com/TJ-Holowaychuk-1/How-is-TJ-Holowaychuk-so-insanely-productive https://www.quora.com/TJ-Holowaychuk-1/How-is-TJ-Holowaychuk...
  - pluma 10y ago
    In the Node ecosystem there was actually more than one person like that -- substack being another obvious example if you're into micro modules (he actually has more modules on npm now than TJ). At various points I was fairly certain that the entirety of all my dependencies were written by no more than three individual people.
    - STRiDEX 10y ago
      Agreed, I've seen a few people like that, TJ just became memorable.
johnloeber 10y ago
Does anyone else think that these simplistic reductions/analogies are woefully inadequate for actually understanding the people you encounter and work with?
- trevyn 10y ago
  Yes, but they're great at driving traffic to your blog. Welcome to 2016. :(
jventura 10y ago
I think I didn't understood the analogy! Is he basically saying that people with natural curiosity explore and do lots of different things?
JetSpiegel 10y ago
T-shapes, paint drip... Dos this means squares are the best kind of people?

185 points by KentBeck 10y ago

A lot of the attributes of "skilled people" could apply to all people. For instance: "Skilled people don’t plan their next focus area. Sometimes it seems completely unrelated to their previous focus area." So does this mean we should not plan our next focus area? What if someone is naturally inclined to plan their focus area, should they resist the urge?

TearsInTheRain 10y ago
An important caveat to not planning your next focus area is that you need to also always be exploring.

calcsam 10y ago

It's worth reading some of Keith's posts about systems and OS on Quora, some of the most interesting stuff I've seen on those topics: https://www.quora.com/profile/Keith-Adams https://www.quora.com/profile/Keith-Adams

TeMPOraL 10y ago

Damn it, they gave it a name. Now we can expect a lot of pop-psychology/business media bullshit about this concept for the coming decade. But yeah, this article generally captures my thoughts about the "T-shaped employee" thing, except that I personally want to be "bicycle-wheel shaped" human. First, a human, because my employment does not define me, and by "bicycle-wheel", for lack of better term, I mean many specializations in different areas that end up connecting with each other. As for the feasability of the "T-shaped" vs "paint drip", I think the latter is better - sure, ceteris paribus, you won't be able to put as much energy into many things as you can put in one, but I believe there are diminishing returns in specializations - and since the job market, like most markets, is terribly inefficient, you can probably get away with multiple specializations up until robots replace us all.

munificent 10y ago
> by "bicycle-wheel", for lack of better term, I mean many specializations in different areas that end up connecting with each other. This is the part that really resonates with me. I'm one of those people that naturally has way too many interests and hobbies than there are hours in the day. What I find time and again is that as I go far enough into some new interest, it starts to converge and connect to my other ones. I see similarities, or ideas where I can combine multiple interests to produce something that I couldn't make with just one of them. These days, I don't even really see separation between them. I'm just a big amorphous blob of all of this stuff, jumbled together. The jumbling together is way more important than any constituent part.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > What I find time and again is that as I go far enough into some new interest, it starts to converge and connect to my other ones. I see similarities, or ideas where I can combine multiple interests to produce something that I couldn't make with just one of them. I've experienced the same thing. I used to joke that if you go far enough in any discipline, you'll end up in philosophy and abstract math. But it's more than that. Reality does not recognize specializations and boundaries. Reality is that "amorphous blob of all of this stuff, jumbled together". Drawing boundaries help us make sense of the world, but it's important to recognize boundaries are somewhat arbitrary and we're free to redraw them to fit our needs better.
  - jcater 10y ago
    Somewhat related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosoph... "Clicking on the first lowercase link in the main text of a Wikipedia article, and then repeating the process for subsequent articles, usually eventually gets one to the Philosophy article. As of May 26, 2011, 94.52% of all articles in Wikipedia lead eventually to the article Philosophy."
    - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago

Xcelerate 10y ago

This goes along with the notion that the typical STEM person is interested in music/art/etc. about as much as the average person, but the typical Nobel Prize winner has a vastly higher interest in these alternative activities than the average person: http://priceonomics.com/the-correlation-between-arts-and-crafts-and-a http://priceonomics.com/the-correlation-between-arts-and-cra... I think the idea of being an "expert in a field" is becoming less valuable today than it used to be. Because there are so many experts in so many fields, they all share the same knowledge, ideas, and preconceptions, and thus the only way to make further progress is to incorporate original ideas from other fields. It goes along with the study that showed that interdisciplinary research has lower citations in the short-term, but many more citations in the long-term.

gearhart 10y ago
Historically, there seem to have been many more multi-disciplinary experts[1], it's simply the last few centuries where academic specialisation has been the norm. My general belief has always been that such things were driven by wealth inequality that allowed small numbers of people to dedicate themselves highly to the pursuit of general academia, which was out of reach for the general masses, and so they could be the leaders of many fields. (Although I will be the first to admit that I have little evidence for it, it simply seems a likely explanation given the historical context.) Potentially this is a re-incarnation of the same phenomenon - we've reached a point where somebody who is successful enough within their field is given immense freedom to explore other areas. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath plus anecdotal considerations of every Greek you can remember
- bbctol 10y ago
  Honestly, I think another reason for so many ancient polymaths is that the fields themselves were less developed, and took less time to fully learn. I in no way want to put down Renaissance polymaths, who were tremendously impressive, but it simply takes less time to learn up to the cutting edge of mathematics or chemistry in 1660 than 2016.
- dredmorbius 10y ago

visakanv 10y ago

And so the circle of metaphors continues.

AndrewOMartin 10y ago

Also there are the people whose proficiencies follow a Gaussian distribution, otherwise known as "Normal people".

Nacraile 10y ago
I'm quibbling, but: I think the pareto distribution is more realistic than the gaussian. ("80% of your capability is allocated to 20% of your skills")

mathattack 10y ago

Interesting analogy. I think this captures the paths of creatives more than large company people. The T-model is great for consulting firms (like McKinsey who uses it) as well as conglomerates like P&G. Catching the interest of someone who can move from Operating Systems to compilers to website design is very different. The one thing I'd add to this is Paint Drip people tend to bring what they learned from one area to others. It's not so just disjointed and random "let's see what drips."

GCA10 10y ago

The "paint drip" approach is great for people who can pull it off, and the opening account of Keith Adams is inspiring. But that same approach to life also is a pretty apt description of low-focus, easily distracted people. I interviewed a job candidate once who had five masters degrees in unrelated fields. In the first five minutes, he sounded amazing. By about minute 15, I realized that his completion rate was very close to zero. And that made it hard for me to think of any job where he'd be effective. Diverse interests can be great. A commitment to life-long learning is inherently a huge plus. But cohesion (even if it's slow and accidental) feels like it needs to be the third part of the formula.

KentBeck 10y ago
Following the drip down the canvas is as important as moving the brush along (to stay with the metaphor).

yumaikas 10y ago

Very interesting metaphor. I would say that skilled peoe don't always plan their next project, but I do on occasion. I can strongly relate to having a lot of little side projects however. That seems to be where I learn the most stuff. I've even turned a lot of programming class projects into more ambitious side projects at times. I've also found that I often have to attempt a technology or system more than once before I get properly comfortable with it. It seems to have worked that way with Go, Phoenix/Elixir, Postgres, Love2d, and so on. My ability to do well in programming has more to do with many side hours spent researching and playing. New stuff takes a bit to settle in.

yumaikas 10y ago

bluetwo 10y ago

(To paraphrase the discussion)... All metaphors are wrong, but some metaphors are useful...

adamnemecek 10y ago

I guess this is a good place for me to ask how do people prioritize what to learn? Also what are your steps to learning something. My recurring issue is that most books/resources stop at this semi intermediate level, and then you are on your own. And figuring out how to progress is sometimes a bit too time consuming.

JoelBennett 10y ago
I'm not saying I'm a paint drip person, but for me it has been either what I'm interested in or what the current job requires. I never expected that I'd learn so much about growing corn, but that's what a current work project involves. On my own, I've been learning about ASP.Net Core 1.0 and JavaScript. For me, it's mostly about projects: I've got something in mind that I want to do, and there's a number of things that I need to learn to accomplish it.
yumaikas 10y ago
My strategy has been to think of a project to do, and then to try to match my tech to that. For instance, I picked up a bit of Love2D at LudumDare 34. Sometimes it works in reverse, I wrote a blog engine for junglecoder.com because I wanted to learn Go and the nature of running servers on the web better. But I have also had a lot of time my hands in the past, so YMMV. After a certain point, programming become more about logistics than individual effort. Another good way to prioritize what to learn, especially if you don't have any good ideas, is to follow where the money flows. If you want to make small contract websites, PHP is a decent choice (as much as I'd never choose it myself, but I have taste issues). C# is about the easiest way to get started on windows for just about anything. Elixir seems like a promising tech, especially with what Phoenix has on offer. Programming is time consuming in the real world, unless you're deep in your comfort zone, but that place has often already been automated anyway. This article seems to be a decent approach as well. I like a lot of what James Hauge has to say. http://prog21.dadgum.com/202.html http://prog21.dadgum.com/202.html
- adamnemecek 10y ago
  Lol my issue isn't with lack of ideas its hat I have too many things I want to learn. But yeah project based learning is a given. I'm not actually talking about programming, I like to think of myself as somewhat experienced, but I'd like to get for example into 3D modeling and I'm not sure where to start.

franciscop 10y ago

A really good example of this would be TJ, who is known in the JS community as one of the authors of Express.js and has done a lot of Node.js-related stuff. But I follow TJ on twitter and he does a lot of unrelated work and has started a company recently [3]. Another good example would be Elon Musk, whom I think needs no introduction here. [1] https://github.com/tj https://github.com/tj [2] https://twitter.com/tjholowaychuk https://twitter.com/tjholowaychuk [3] https://apex.sh/ping/ https://apex.sh/ping/

STRiDEX 10y ago
We have an ongoing joke at our office where we ask if TJ wrote it. It being a package we're adding to our project. Was true more often in the past, but its still funny.
- d0lph 10y ago
  Wasn't there a theory a while back that TJ was not even a real person, but a collective, simply because of how many things he was involved in?
  - jaredsohn 10y ago
    https://www.quora.com/TJ-Holowaychuk-1/How-is-TJ-Holowaychuk-so-insanely-productive https://www.quora.com/TJ-Holowaychuk-1/How-is-TJ-Holowaychuk...
- pluma 10y ago
  In the Node ecosystem there was actually more than one person like that -- substack being another obvious example if you're into micro modules (he actually has more modules on npm now than TJ). At various points I was fairly certain that the entirety of all my dependencies were written by no more than three individual people.
  - STRiDEX 10y ago
    Agreed, I've seen a few people like that, TJ just became memorable.

johnloeber 10y ago

Does anyone else think that these simplistic reductions/analogies are woefully inadequate for actually understanding the people you encounter and work with?

trevyn 10y ago
Yes, but they're great at driving traffic to your blog. Welcome to 2016. :(

jventura 10y ago

I think I didn't understood the analogy! Is he basically saying that people with natural curiosity explore and do lots of different things?

JetSpiegel 10y ago

T-shapes, paint drip... Dos this means squares are the best kind of people?