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> Climbing to a higher vantage point can also unlock new forms of extraordinary that you might have never noticed before. I read an article once about how the

by umvi 6y ago

> Climbing to a higher vantage point can also unlock new forms of extraordinary that you might have never noticed before. I read an article once about how the amount of work to get into the top tier in a single area is astronomical, but the amount of work to become top tier in a combination of 2-3 fields is attainable by almost anyone. For example, becoming a top tier statistician is hard. But becoming a top tier statistician/programmer is easier. In other words, if you can get to a state where you know more statistics than your average programmer and more programming than your average statistician, then suddenly you are an above-average programmer/statistician. Keep improving those two skills and you may start to "unlock new forms of extraordinary". Or maybe you are a music teacher, and also pretty good at programming, and so you can make extraordinary music teaching software that is way better than the competition's because you understand the nuances of music teaching intimately enough that you capture them clearly in software requirements. Or maybe you are pretty good at art, pretty good at music composition, pretty good at programming, pretty good at story telling (not necessarily top tier in any one category though)... and you combine all of those skills to single-handedly create a game that by many measures is extraordinary[0][1]. Something like that. Anyway, the point being, you may not be extraordinary in any one field, but it isn't too hard to achieve extraordinary things due to a combination of skills in multiple fields if you work at it. [0] https://undertale.com/ https://undertale.com/ [1] https://www.cavestory.org/ https://www.cavestory.org/

shostack 6y ago
I first encountered this notion playing D&D of all things. The concept of dual/multi-classing, and what later became prestige classes/archetypes in later editions was all about highlighting that the sum of the parts was greater than the whole. There was a trade-off of course, especially in the early/mid levels as other solo-class characters started coming into their stride with higher-tier abilities. If you made it past that stage as you continued developing your other class(s), you really ended up with a unique character.
- rotexo 6y ago
  The benefits of multi-classing go beyond the combat mechanics of the game, as well. If you develop a character-driven reason for multi-classing, that's character growth in action. Great for role-playing as well as for driving the plot of the campaign forwards.
  - shostack 6y ago
    Great point. This was one of my favorite aspects of it actually. I started as a rogue and would gradually "harvest" some sort of arcane trophy from various monsters we defeated or quests we went on. I gradually cobbled together a spellbook as I grew my rogue, including some hacked together spells that had some wild magic type surprises at first as I was learning. These were the most fun levels by far.
    - mattmanser 6y ago
      It's designed like that though, and artificially so. It's not real. It's like taking dating tips from films, it's made up. And if you copy what they do in films you'd end up being really creepy.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
danhak 6y ago
I like this idea very much. "Find your niche," in other words?
- dstick 6y ago
  I remember reading this somewhere as well. If I recall correctly it was called something like “compound skills”. Could have been... Linchpin.
  - postsantum 6y ago
    Skill stacking
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    There is the notion of skill shapes. Typically, I, T, M (sometimes Π, N, or E), and X (describing leadership), sometimes dash ("—", pure generalist), also tree. The idea being to have some mix of depth and breadth. Multiple depths is often quite useful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills Horrible quickly DDG'd blogs (the concept tends to attract — shallow exposition): https://peoplecentre.wordpress.com/2017/06/19/the-m-shaped-employee/ https://peoplecentre.wordpress.com/2017/06/19/the-m-shaped-e... https://www.leadingagile.com/2017/02/e-shaped-staff/ https://www.leadingagile.com/2017/02/e-shaped-staff/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/which-letter-shaped-future-employees-leaders-esin-akay https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/which-letter-shaped-future-em... https://tcagley.wordpress.com/2016/06/14/productive-agile-teams-i-t-e-and-m-shaped-people/ https://tcagley.wordpress.com/2016/06/14/productive-agile-te... https://aboutleaders.com/skill-shape-leader/ https://aboutleaders.com/skill-shape-leader/
tmatthe 6y ago
AH yes that is exactly what I meant! I love the examples you put out here.
friday99 6y ago
I first heard that advice referenced from Scott Adams the creator of Dilbert. Where he notes that he is not a very good artist or very funny, but combining the two with his background in business is why he was successful. https://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/career-advice.html https://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/car...
- ZainRiz 6y ago
  +1 And as patio11 says, combining engineering with good writing skills makes it very easy to be one of the top with your combined skills I’ve been trying to lean more into that advice the past couple months by publishing on my blog :) Surprisingly enough, just this morning I woke up to realize someone had shared an article I wrote and it was on the HN front page! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24251068#24262190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24251068#24262190
  - non-entity 6y ago
    But does being in the top of those combined skills command top pay?
    - infermore 6y ago
      I'm pretty sure it does, but I'm also pretty sure it's okay if it doesn't.
    - ansible 6y ago
      If you're at the level where you can write a decent book on programming or something... that means guaranteed job offers for the rest of your career. Like, I haven't seen Raymond Chen's resume, but if he calls me up tomorrow looking for a job, I'll find something for him, even if we're not hiring. Ditto for Steve Klabnik, Carol Nichols, and some other people in the Rust community.
    - julianlam 6y ago
      Depends what those two or more skills are. You might be a top flight musical basket weaver but that won't pay too well.
throwaway1777 6y ago
A relevant analogy is small fish in a big pond or big fish in a small pond. You are effectively making the pond smaller by going into a more specific niche.
rjsw 6y ago
There are not very many people with defined Erdős–Bacon numbers [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93Bacon_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93Bacon_numbe...
- framecowbird 6y ago
  > To have a defined Erdős–Bacon number, it is necessary to have both appeared in a film and co-authored an academic paper, although this in and of itself is not sufficient. This surprised me. I guess you could star in a tiny indie film completely closed off from the Bacon graph...
  - dmurray 6y ago
    Probably easier to co-author a paper with another novice author.
  - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    I imagine there would be one massive connected component and a large number of really tiny ones.
- gvurrdon 6y ago
  Apparently there are sufficient (even I have one - 7 IIRC) that an even more exclusive club as been formed: https://rosschurchley.com/blog/who-else-has-an-erdos-bacon-sabbath-number/ https://rosschurchley.com/blog/who-else-has-an-erdos-bacon-s...
langitbiru 6y ago
In other words, generalists triumphs over specialists. But the best of them is the multi-specialists. https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/19/the-dual-phd-problem-of-todays-startups/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/19/the-dual-phd-problem-of-to...
andygcook 6y ago
Sam Altman posted a tweet storm about this topic a couple of hours ago. You'd probably find it interesting: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1297912739206242306 https://twitter.com/sama/status/1297912739206242306
JohnBooty 6y ago
I like your examples: those two games were amazing to play and very inspirational to me personally, for the reasons you articulated so well. I once heard another example of a man who'd washed out of both medical school and art school, lacking the apitude and/or drive to really make it in either field. He wound up finding a very successful career as an illustrator of medical textbooks, as the number of people versed in both medicine and art is extremely small. He's booked up years in advance. (That man's story was, I believe, part of an NPR news story roughly 15 years ago. I've not been able to find any mention of it since then!) I've been able to combine good-but-not-elite skills in my own career in order to find success.
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  My aunt trained in medical illustration at the Cleveland Institute of Art. She switched to primary education years ago and could never get a gig in her original field.
  - JohnBooty 6y ago
    That's interesting to hear and, more importantly, I'm sorry to hear that. Perhaps the man in the radio broadcast was able to succeed because he had the luxury of a (full? partial?) medical education as well. (It's also worth noting that only a tiny fraction of the populace would be able to afford such an amount of education - he must've had soooooome trust fund, or indulgent parents, or something)
op03 6y ago
What people haven't realized is you dont need to think in terms of Hierarchy anymore. Which is the way people have thought about anything for thousands of years. Fitting into domination or skill based hierarchies was optimal when resources where limited. The Network and its explosion in the last 20-30 (not even one generation old) challenges the reliance on anything Hierarchical. Just one example - I can connect to my boss's boss's boss with a tweet or an email or whatsapp message and establish a connection. A deep one if I am of value. I dont need to go through my boss or through multiple levels anymore. It changes everything. The more networked everything gets the harder and harder its going to get for hierarchies to maintain their stability. Why are Experts and Famous people's weaknesses so easy to find and pounce on today? Because of the network. Stop thinking about Hierarchies and how to climb up or what pushes ppl down. Its outdated. Those who climb and pretend there is some safe summit, their weaknesses will be scrutinized by thousands more people than in the past. You can see it from Obama to Gates to Trump to Xi to your favorite scientist or celeb who has fallen from grace. So think about Networks. Think about how they are created, how connections strengthen, how two networks connect, how to grow them etc. Networks change the value of all people. Just as in the Brain. There is no one extraordinary neuron. Book recos - Niall Ferguson - The Square and the Tower - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07KKYostAJ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07KKYostAJ0 Albert-László Barabási - The Formula Moises Naim - The end of power The Hierarchies of Skill and Domination will continue to face major pressure the likes they haven't seen in the past from ever changing network configurations.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  I can connect to my boss's boss's boss with a tweet or an email or whatsapp message and establish a connection And then your 3boss recommends firing you for insubordination regardless of your value.
  - rimjongun 6y ago
    For real, the old ways aren’t just disappearing overnight, or over 30 years. Our organization and social structures are in many ways baked in.
borroka 6y ago
I disagree. It is one those things that are said once, repeated enough and make enough sense to be believed, although I suspect they are not true. If you combine an average programmer with an average statistician, you get a profile that is not particularly attractive. If the comment that follows is: but is it not what data scientist are? the answer is that good data scientist have good (or great) programming for what the programming they need to do. My undergrad and Master's are in an interdisciplinary field, which had at the time felt needed by Universities offering those degrees, but in the end the professional profile was not of interest. An average knowledge of chemistry, engineering, physics, and other sciences does not make you an interdisciplinary scientist, but someone who can do a little bit of many things, but not at the level that is required in order to get paid for it. The Dilbert's creator has excellent drawing abilities for the comics he is drawing —- here the lesson is that you need to do excellent relative to the quality that is needed, not that if you combine average talents you get world-class results.
- phkahler 6y ago
  >> If you combine an average programmer with an average statistician, you get a profile that is not particularly attractive. Nobody said being average at both was enough. The parent post specifically said if you know more than average in both areas. You still need to be good, but the combination of good in multiple areas is claimed to be sort of like being extraordinary in one. I think there's some truth in that.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    I still think the parent has a strong point though. Stats and CS are correlated skill sets. Almost all CS people learn a good bit of statistics as part of their education process, and I suspect that most statisticians are passable programmers. The fact that we have a term for the combination of both skills suggests that being great in both is not unique, it just makes you a great data scientist. The crux behind the idea of being better than average at two things makes you individually extraordinary is that the two skills are not correlated. An above average singer is probably an above average player of one or more instruments, but I'm sure there aren't many who are also great ice cream makers.
giantg2 6y ago
Too bad society generally doesn't reward that sort of combined expertise due to rigid licensing/credentialing/organizational structures.
Noos 6y ago
No, the problem is that what is defined as top tier keeps rising, and raises the bar just to be average. You also now have to compete with a huge cohort of people due to the net now. Going with the videogame focus, if you ever play competitive games you actually see how brutal it can be. In Overwatch for example you have an absolute mountain to climb in ranked because you can't just improve, you have to improve above average to increase your rank. This means a lot of people are getting better at the game over time but are going down in ranking simply because everyone else is getting better faster. Essentially the internconnectedness of everything is making it hard to find the niches you speak of. There's always someone who loves his job so much and works at it so much that he defines the meta, so to say. This is a problem in computer science, even.
- d23 6y ago
  This is a ridiculously defeatist attitude, and the quicker you can drop it the better off you'll be.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    If video games are the subject the attitude should be am I having fun, not am I getting better. Some people can make money at playing games (both video and otherwise), but most people need to be okay with doing it for fun and never being world class.
    - sellyme 6y ago
      This discounts the long-term benefits of learning to derive pleasure from the progression of your own skills and abilities.
      - bluGill 6y ago
        Fair point. Pleasure is the goal
- pm90 6y ago
  While this is true, there are simply so many problems that need solving and too few humans to solve them, which makes it not too hard to do well in life. Luckily, life isn’t a zero sum game unlike video games.
wjossey 6y ago
This is my career so far in a nutshell. I’m an average programmer. I’m an excellent problem solver. I have an above average work ethic. I’m an excellent communicator. Basically, I combined all of these traits and found roles that leveraged these traits to maximize my impact. Not for nothing, but this is why my liberal arts college was profoundly impactful for me, despite not getting a “top tier” CS education. My writing abilities were given a shot in the arm, because I had to write so many analysis papers for my government minor. My understanding of human behavior was expanded by my psychology courses. My understanding of how I should never design a UI was solidified by how poorly I did during a year of art classes. Some days I wish I was as strong mathematically as my friends who went to MIT, or as talented with programming languages as my friends who went to Cambridge, but each one of us have been able to have successful careers, despite our differences in breadth/depth.
- j45 6y ago
  An HR leader once shared with me: "Because every hire is a compromise between available candidates.. there is no perfect hire, and no two candidates are truly comparable." It's really an eye-opening statement for tech roles, and how formally taught and self-taught/transferred folks can work side by side successfully. The unique thing about tech skills is there's more than one valid way to solve a problem or do something "right". It's hard to measure that. Not even two CS majors who may be equivalently capable (in different ways) on the outset will be identical, nor will be the outcome of how they grow their strengths and capabilities. I look forward to HR continuing to evolve better to understand technical roles and contributions as being beyond a binary yes/no measurement. Current hiring practices continue not to extend well from a bricks and mortar approach to a abstracted online/digital measurement. In the meantime... knowing how to leverage and communicate your skillet in a transferable way is really what's important. There's no better way to do that than learning to write and communicate well, and better than others.
  - triyambakam 6y ago
    In terms of concrete specifics, I've found having interviews with at least 3 engineers on the team you will potentially be working with to be really helpful for both sides to evaluate, and more specifically when the interviews are pair programming problem solving. You get to see how the candidate works through a problem and they don't have to code for an exact solution (or I don't think that should be the requirement anyways, it should be more about approach and communication than an exactly correct implementation , especially given limited time)
ctvo 6y ago
Stated differently: Diminishing returns on time invested to expertise gained becomes unattractive at the highest expertise levels. A lot of time is required for a small growth in expertise (pushing to expand the frontier of knowledge in physics, for example). You can be an expert, but not the world class expert, with less time invested (before diminishing returns becomes prohibitive). I like to think of this as catching up to the state of the art, but not actively working to advance it (much, much harder). Do this in multiple fields and you may have a unique skillset or perspective that's valuable.
jcaguilar 6y ago
I think you talking about this one? https://forge.medium.com/how-to-become-the-best-in-the-world-at-something-f1b658f93428 https://forge.medium.com/how-to-become-the-best-in-the-world...
- umvi 6y ago
  Yes, that was exactly the one I was referring to in my OP, but I couldn't remember enough keywords to find it. Thanks!
simias 6y ago
I definitely recognize myself in this. I consider myself a decent programmer but I also know quite a bit about electronics and even a bit of Verilog/VHDL. Not enough to work as an ASIC/FPGA engineer, but enough to understand the broad concepts and how it all fits together. If you talk to me about timing violations and setup times and clock trees I'm not completely out of my depth. All that happened pretty much by accident, mainly because I was always interested in all things low level, but it proves really advantageous in my career. Basically if a problem stands at the interface between hardware and software I tend to be massively more productive than a very good software engineer who knows very little of electronics or vice versa. If we have a problem like "we have this driver that seems to lock up because it misses an IRQ, but we're not sure if it's a software race or a hardware problem" I can usually help. Of course that's all fairly niche, but as long as the niche is big enough that's not an issue. It's all about finding complementary skills. There might be a need somewhere for a good software dev that also very good at Sumo, but that's probably not very common...
samatman 6y ago
I learned this lesson from Clifford Stoll. He said that astronomers figure he must be an exceptional programmer, since he's clearly a mediocre astronomer. While programmers figure he must be an exceptional astronomer, since his programming is strictly middle-of-the-road! Of course, these days, he's the best dang Klein bottle glass blower in the game. No substitute for finding your niche.
- jakeva 6y ago
  Not to mention a pretty good writer. I recently finished "The Cuckoo's Egg" and found it both highly informative and entertaining.
- Balgair 6y ago
  Cliff is an amazing person. Just a joy! Every time I see him on Numberphile, my life is made better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Stoll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Stoll https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU P.S. Cliff, we know you're on HN. Please continue being yourself, it seems like a really great person to be!
- loco5niner 6y ago
  > Of course, these days, he's the best dang Klein bottle glass blower in the game. And of course, he hires out the manufacturing. That's why he has (an awesome, little) warehouse under his hour full of them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU
munificent 6y ago
I can't find the quote now, but I recall Bill Bailey saying once that he's not a good enough musician to just play music and not funny enough to just be a comedian. But he's the funniest musician and the most musical comedian out there.
- samplatt 6y ago
  I think most of his fans would be willing to say that he's more than good enough at both, but that's looking at a career 35+ years in the making.
roystonvassey 6y ago
This is spot on. For a while, in my career, it felt like I was pursuing multiple career paths and in fact, there were many times I wondered if those were wasted years. Turns out, that being a fairly good jack of a few trades does pay off. A mix of knowledge of analytics, statistics that was honed through a few years in economic research and most importantly, business understanding. I see that all of these skills, together, help me understand and grasp problems much better. I am not the best cloud ops guy or the one with the best code or in-pace with the latest arxiv paper on machine learning but when faced with the latest business question on how to use data to help drive sales or reduce costs, I know enough to piece the different bits together and build a prototype at the least. This is hugely empowering. I owe it to luck and fortune of course, but when the opportunity presents I felt these cross-domain skills made me more confident and helped visualise the solution better. PS: I have not mentioned the most important skill though - how you work with people but I believe that is only gained through experience
amelius 6y ago
There are some problems with that though. Let's pick your first example and say you are a statistician/programmer. The problem is that whenever you talk to your peers, which are either better statisticians or better programmers, you will have a hard time earning their respect. Also, most people will know intuitively that it is easier to diversify than it is to specialize. And by combining skills you aren't going to make it into the history books. However, hard work in one area may actually get you there one day.
NikolaNovak 6y ago
I believe I read that article as well; but haven't been able to find it in a while; it's not pateo11 OR Malcolm Gladwell ;), but does anybody have a link to a blog/article that may have been the original source? Thx! :)
jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
devops
hatmatrix 6y ago
Jack of [many] trades, master of none.
- collyw 6y ago
  "T-shaped developer" master of one (or two).
pks016 6y ago
Coincidence; I discovered Cavestory few days back and I'm currently playing now.
arvinsim 6y ago
Been wondering about this. I built my career on focusing on the technical aspects of programming only. I feel that people who got domain knowledge were always better contributors even if their technical programming knowledge is not that great. Been contemplating on getting a masters on an interesting field but current economic climate is still uncertain.
- divan 6y ago
  Programming is not about coding or knowing technical intricacies. It’s a two step process: 1) understand the universe 2) explain it to the three years old Coding comes as a part of the second step, but domain knowledge is crucial for the first.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
I'm an OK developer, don't know anything but superficial about AI or parser combinators or compilers, and most of my work is building pages, forms, APIs and databases and has been for the past decade+. However, my experience doing that trick is very varied by now; I can do the trick in a handful of back-end languages, front-end frameworks, even native iOS. So yeah I'm nowhere near a rockstar developer, but I'm experienced, productive, pragmatic, etc. It won't make me ridiculously rich but I get by. That said, I could increase my income by going self-employed I guess.
- collyw 6y ago
  Sounds like me. Never gonna be rich, but doesn't look like I'll be out of a job any time soon.
regulation_d 6y ago
I agree in principle, though I think the example is telling. If the combination is valuable enough, in this case programmer/statistician, then we simply create a new field for you to compete in: data science.
mikorym 6y ago
> becoming a top tier statistician is hard > but the amount of work to become top tier in a combination of 2-3 fields is attainable by almost anyone I think this is general work advice and in that sense I think it makes sense; it holds even more for {x, programming}. From my perspective, specificity and personality is an important part of the creative process towards becoming an expert or otherwise accomplished in a field, or at least, a field that has some inventiveness to it. In other words, focusing on even fewer things than a field such as statistics. To use the statistics example, I view statistics, or at least applied statistics, from the point of view of multivariate statistics. This makes me quite ignorant towards frequentist statistics (no, I am not about to promote Bayesian statistics, which in my opinion is the word that often refers simply to the Bayes Theorem in the context of frequentist statistics) but with very clear reasons: 1. Normality doesn't really come into play in multivariate stats unless we are sampling randomly and without context. In multivariate stats, we actually tend to either use an exhaustive dataset or we sample contextually, or maybe uniformly along a geographical feature such as a riverbed. 2. Dependence of variables is why we resort to multivariate statistics in the first place. 3. Sample size, similar to 1.), is often not applicable. It does apply in the sense that a small matrix gives few insights. However, replicates in an experiment in frequentist statistics are used as a measure of internal variation in relation to between group variation. In multivariate stats you can do the analysis in complete ignorance of whether there are groups at all, or, you can use the groups in a similar way and consider replicates. But there are not hard conventions like having at least three replicates in order to define what variation means in the first place. In multivariate stats variation is a measure of variation between variables, not groups, and the principal components order variation in terms of new, virtual variables via eigenvectors. 4. For a combination of these reasons, the general application of different types of statistics, specifically frequentist statistics as opposed to multivariate statistics tend to change the whole field you are working in to start off with. Now, the reason for my elaborate story about differences in statistical approaches is that to be an expert in anything, I personally think is a journey towards discovering what makes your interests peculiar, or if you prefer another word, special. (Also, it depends on which experts you happen to be exposed to.) So, yes, of course it should be hard to be one of the best in anything, but I think a reasonable approach is to find the peculiarities of what you could become deeply committed to. Frequentist statistics is contextually difficult for me to be focused on, and that makes it difficult. However, once the central limit theorem gets introduced, I instead would venture towards it and then once again forget whether I even can ever have enough time to properly study sampling. After all, I wasn't the one to happen to work for Guinness. Beer, now that would be a good reason to study sampling.

by umvi 6y ago

shostack 6y ago

I first encountered this notion playing D&D of all things. The concept of dual/multi-classing, and what later became prestige classes/archetypes in later editions was all about highlighting that the sum of the parts was greater than the whole. There was a trade-off of course, especially in the early/mid levels as other solo-class characters started coming into their stride with higher-tier abilities. If you made it past that stage as you continued developing your other class(s), you really ended up with a unique character.

rotexo 6y ago
The benefits of multi-classing go beyond the combat mechanics of the game, as well. If you develop a character-driven reason for multi-classing, that's character growth in action. Great for role-playing as well as for driving the plot of the campaign forwards.
- shostack 6y ago
  Great point. This was one of my favorite aspects of it actually. I started as a rogue and would gradually "harvest" some sort of arcane trophy from various monsters we defeated or quests we went on. I gradually cobbled together a spellbook as I grew my rogue, including some hacked together spells that had some wild magic type surprises at first as I was learning. These were the most fun levels by far.
  - mattmanser 6y ago
    It's designed like that though, and artificially so. It's not real. It's like taking dating tips from films, it's made up. And if you copy what they do in films you'd end up being really creepy.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

danhak 6y ago

I like this idea very much. "Find your niche," in other words?

dstick 6y ago
I remember reading this somewhere as well. If I recall correctly it was called something like “compound skills”. Could have been... Linchpin.
- postsantum 6y ago
  Skill stacking
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  There is the notion of skill shapes. Typically, I, T, M (sometimes Π, N, or E), and X (describing leadership), sometimes dash ("—", pure generalist), also tree. The idea being to have some mix of depth and breadth. Multiple depths is often quite useful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills Horrible quickly DDG'd blogs (the concept tends to attract — shallow exposition): https://peoplecentre.wordpress.com/2017/06/19/the-m-shaped-employee/ https://peoplecentre.wordpress.com/2017/06/19/the-m-shaped-e... https://www.leadingagile.com/2017/02/e-shaped-staff/ https://www.leadingagile.com/2017/02/e-shaped-staff/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/which-letter-shaped-future-employees-leaders-esin-akay https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/which-letter-shaped-future-em... https://tcagley.wordpress.com/2016/06/14/productive-agile-teams-i-t-e-and-m-shaped-people/ https://tcagley.wordpress.com/2016/06/14/productive-agile-te... https://aboutleaders.com/skill-shape-leader/ https://aboutleaders.com/skill-shape-leader/

tmatthe 6y ago

AH yes that is exactly what I meant! I love the examples you put out here.

friday99 6y ago

I first heard that advice referenced from Scott Adams the creator of Dilbert. Where he notes that he is not a very good artist or very funny, but combining the two with his background in business is why he was successful. https://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/career-advice.html https://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/car...

ZainRiz 6y ago
+1 And as patio11 says, combining engineering with good writing skills makes it very easy to be one of the top with your combined skills I’ve been trying to lean more into that advice the past couple months by publishing on my blog :) Surprisingly enough, just this morning I woke up to realize someone had shared an article I wrote and it was on the HN front page! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24251068#24262190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24251068#24262190
- non-entity 6y ago
  But does being in the top of those combined skills command top pay?
  - infermore 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure it does, but I'm also pretty sure it's okay if it doesn't.
  - ansible 6y ago
    If you're at the level where you can write a decent book on programming or something... that means guaranteed job offers for the rest of your career. Like, I haven't seen Raymond Chen's resume, but if he calls me up tomorrow looking for a job, I'll find something for him, even if we're not hiring. Ditto for Steve Klabnik, Carol Nichols, and some other people in the Rust community.
  - julianlam 6y ago
    Depends what those two or more skills are. You might be a top flight musical basket weaver but that won't pay too well.

throwaway1777 6y ago

A relevant analogy is small fish in a big pond or big fish in a small pond. You are effectively making the pond smaller by going into a more specific niche.

rjsw 6y ago

There are not very many people with defined Erdős–Bacon numbers [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93Bacon_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%93Bacon_numbe...

framecowbird 6y ago
> To have a defined Erdős–Bacon number, it is necessary to have both appeared in a film and co-authored an academic paper, although this in and of itself is not sufficient. This surprised me. I guess you could star in a tiny indie film completely closed off from the Bacon graph...
- dmurray 6y ago
  Probably easier to co-author a paper with another novice author.
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago
  I imagine there would be one massive connected component and a large number of really tiny ones.
gvurrdon 6y ago
Apparently there are sufficient (even I have one - 7 IIRC) that an even more exclusive club as been formed: https://rosschurchley.com/blog/who-else-has-an-erdos-bacon-sabbath-number/ https://rosschurchley.com/blog/who-else-has-an-erdos-bacon-s...

langitbiru 6y ago

In other words, generalists triumphs over specialists. But the best of them is the multi-specialists. https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/19/the-dual-phd-problem-of-todays-startups/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/19/the-dual-phd-problem-of-to...

andygcook 6y ago

Sam Altman posted a tweet storm about this topic a couple of hours ago. You'd probably find it interesting: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1297912739206242306 https://twitter.com/sama/status/1297912739206242306

JohnBooty 6y ago

I like your examples: those two games were amazing to play and very inspirational to me personally, for the reasons you articulated so well. I once heard another example of a man who'd washed out of both medical school and art school, lacking the apitude and/or drive to really make it in either field. He wound up finding a very successful career as an illustrator of medical textbooks, as the number of people versed in both medicine and art is extremely small. He's booked up years in advance. (That man's story was, I believe, part of an NPR news story roughly 15 years ago. I've not been able to find any mention of it since then!) I've been able to combine good-but-not-elite skills in my own career in order to find success.

selimthegrim 6y ago
My aunt trained in medical illustration at the Cleveland Institute of Art. She switched to primary education years ago and could never get a gig in her original field.
- JohnBooty 6y ago
  That's interesting to hear and, more importantly, I'm sorry to hear that. Perhaps the man in the radio broadcast was able to succeed because he had the luxury of a (full? partial?) medical education as well. (It's also worth noting that only a tiny fraction of the populace would be able to afford such an amount of education - he must've had soooooome trust fund, or indulgent parents, or something)

op03 6y ago

What people haven't realized is you dont need to think in terms of Hierarchy anymore. Which is the way people have thought about anything for thousands of years. Fitting into domination or skill based hierarchies was optimal when resources where limited. The Network and its explosion in the last 20-30 (not even one generation old) challenges the reliance on anything Hierarchical. Just one example - I can connect to my boss's boss's boss with a tweet or an email or whatsapp message and establish a connection. A deep one if I am of value. I dont need to go through my boss or through multiple levels anymore. It changes everything. The more networked everything gets the harder and harder its going to get for hierarchies to maintain their stability. Why are Experts and Famous people's weaknesses so easy to find and pounce on today? Because of the network. Stop thinking about Hierarchies and how to climb up or what pushes ppl down. Its outdated. Those who climb and pretend there is some safe summit, their weaknesses will be scrutinized by thousands more people than in the past. You can see it from Obama to Gates to Trump to Xi to your favorite scientist or celeb who has fallen from grace. So think about Networks. Think about how they are created, how connections strengthen, how two networks connect, how to grow them etc. Networks change the value of all people. Just as in the Brain. There is no one extraordinary neuron. Book recos - Niall Ferguson - The Square and the Tower - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07KKYostAJ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07KKYostAJ0 Albert-László Barabási - The Formula Moises Naim - The end of power The Hierarchies of Skill and Domination will continue to face major pressure the likes they haven't seen in the past from ever changing network configurations.

nitrogen 6y ago
I can connect to my boss's boss's boss with a tweet or an email or whatsapp message and establish a connection And then your 3boss recommends firing you for insubordination regardless of your value.
- rimjongun 6y ago
  For real, the old ways aren’t just disappearing overnight, or over 30 years. Our organization and social structures are in many ways baked in.

borroka 6y ago

I disagree. It is one those things that are said once, repeated enough and make enough sense to be believed, although I suspect they are not true. If you combine an average programmer with an average statistician, you get a profile that is not particularly attractive. If the comment that follows is: but is it not what data scientist are? the answer is that good data scientist have good (or great) programming for what the programming they need to do. My undergrad and Master's are in an interdisciplinary field, which had at the time felt needed by Universities offering those degrees, but in the end the professional profile was not of interest. An average knowledge of chemistry, engineering, physics, and other sciences does not make you an interdisciplinary scientist, but someone who can do a little bit of many things, but not at the level that is required in order to get paid for it. The Dilbert's creator has excellent drawing abilities for the comics he is drawing —- here the lesson is that you need to do excellent relative to the quality that is needed, not that if you combine average talents you get world-class results.

phkahler 6y ago
>> If you combine an average programmer with an average statistician, you get a profile that is not particularly attractive. Nobody said being average at both was enough. The parent post specifically said if you know more than average in both areas. You still need to be good, but the combination of good in multiple areas is claimed to be sort of like being extraordinary in one. I think there's some truth in that.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  I still think the parent has a strong point though. Stats and CS are correlated skill sets. Almost all CS people learn a good bit of statistics as part of their education process, and I suspect that most statisticians are passable programmers. The fact that we have a term for the combination of both skills suggests that being great in both is not unique, it just makes you a great data scientist. The crux behind the idea of being better than average at two things makes you individually extraordinary is that the two skills are not correlated. An above average singer is probably an above average player of one or more instruments, but I'm sure there aren't many who are also great ice cream makers.

giantg2 6y ago

Too bad society generally doesn't reward that sort of combined expertise due to rigid licensing/credentialing/organizational structures.

Noos 6y ago

No, the problem is that what is defined as top tier keeps rising, and raises the bar just to be average. You also now have to compete with a huge cohort of people due to the net now. Going with the videogame focus, if you ever play competitive games you actually see how brutal it can be. In Overwatch for example you have an absolute mountain to climb in ranked because you can't just improve, you have to improve above average to increase your rank. This means a lot of people are getting better at the game over time but are going down in ranking simply because everyone else is getting better faster. Essentially the internconnectedness of everything is making it hard to find the niches you speak of. There's always someone who loves his job so much and works at it so much that he defines the meta, so to say. This is a problem in computer science, even.

d23 6y ago
This is a ridiculously defeatist attitude, and the quicker you can drop it the better off you'll be.
- bluGill 6y ago
  If video games are the subject the attitude should be am I having fun, not am I getting better. Some people can make money at playing games (both video and otherwise), but most people need to be okay with doing it for fun and never being world class.
  - sellyme 6y ago
    This discounts the long-term benefits of learning to derive pleasure from the progression of your own skills and abilities.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      Fair point. Pleasure is the goal
pm90 6y ago
While this is true, there are simply so many problems that need solving and too few humans to solve them, which makes it not too hard to do well in life. Luckily, life isn’t a zero sum game unlike video games.

wjossey 6y ago

This is my career so far in a nutshell. I’m an average programmer. I’m an excellent problem solver. I have an above average work ethic. I’m an excellent communicator. Basically, I combined all of these traits and found roles that leveraged these traits to maximize my impact. Not for nothing, but this is why my liberal arts college was profoundly impactful for me, despite not getting a “top tier” CS education. My writing abilities were given a shot in the arm, because I had to write so many analysis papers for my government minor. My understanding of human behavior was expanded by my psychology courses. My understanding of how I should never design a UI was solidified by how poorly I did during a year of art classes. Some days I wish I was as strong mathematically as my friends who went to MIT, or as talented with programming languages as my friends who went to Cambridge, but each one of us have been able to have successful careers, despite our differences in breadth/depth.

j45 6y ago
An HR leader once shared with me: "Because every hire is a compromise between available candidates.. there is no perfect hire, and no two candidates are truly comparable." It's really an eye-opening statement for tech roles, and how formally taught and self-taught/transferred folks can work side by side successfully. The unique thing about tech skills is there's more than one valid way to solve a problem or do something "right". It's hard to measure that. Not even two CS majors who may be equivalently capable (in different ways) on the outset will be identical, nor will be the outcome of how they grow their strengths and capabilities. I look forward to HR continuing to evolve better to understand technical roles and contributions as being beyond a binary yes/no measurement. Current hiring practices continue not to extend well from a bricks and mortar approach to a abstracted online/digital measurement. In the meantime... knowing how to leverage and communicate your skillet in a transferable way is really what's important. There's no better way to do that than learning to write and communicate well, and better than others.
- triyambakam 6y ago
  In terms of concrete specifics, I've found having interviews with at least 3 engineers on the team you will potentially be working with to be really helpful for both sides to evaluate, and more specifically when the interviews are pair programming problem solving. You get to see how the candidate works through a problem and they don't have to code for an exact solution (or I don't think that should be the requirement anyways, it should be more about approach and communication than an exactly correct implementation , especially given limited time)

ctvo 6y ago

Stated differently: Diminishing returns on time invested to expertise gained becomes unattractive at the highest expertise levels. A lot of time is required for a small growth in expertise (pushing to expand the frontier of knowledge in physics, for example). You can be an expert, but not the world class expert, with less time invested (before diminishing returns becomes prohibitive). I like to think of this as catching up to the state of the art, but not actively working to advance it (much, much harder). Do this in multiple fields and you may have a unique skillset or perspective that's valuable.

jcaguilar 6y ago

I think you talking about this one? https://forge.medium.com/how-to-become-the-best-in-the-world-at-something-f1b658f93428 https://forge.medium.com/how-to-become-the-best-in-the-world...

umvi 6y ago
Yes, that was exactly the one I was referring to in my OP, but I couldn't remember enough keywords to find it. Thanks!

simias 6y ago

I definitely recognize myself in this. I consider myself a decent programmer but I also know quite a bit about electronics and even a bit of Verilog/VHDL. Not enough to work as an ASIC/FPGA engineer, but enough to understand the broad concepts and how it all fits together. If you talk to me about timing violations and setup times and clock trees I'm not completely out of my depth. All that happened pretty much by accident, mainly because I was always interested in all things low level, but it proves really advantageous in my career. Basically if a problem stands at the interface between hardware and software I tend to be massively more productive than a very good software engineer who knows very little of electronics or vice versa. If we have a problem like "we have this driver that seems to lock up because it misses an IRQ, but we're not sure if it's a software race or a hardware problem" I can usually help. Of course that's all fairly niche, but as long as the niche is big enough that's not an issue. It's all about finding complementary skills. There might be a need somewhere for a good software dev that also very good at Sumo, but that's probably not very common...

samatman 6y ago

I learned this lesson from Clifford Stoll. He said that astronomers figure he must be an exceptional programmer, since he's clearly a mediocre astronomer. While programmers figure he must be an exceptional astronomer, since his programming is strictly middle-of-the-road! Of course, these days, he's the best dang Klein bottle glass blower in the game. No substitute for finding your niche.

jakeva 6y ago
Not to mention a pretty good writer. I recently finished "The Cuckoo's Egg" and found it both highly informative and entertaining.
Balgair 6y ago
Cliff is an amazing person. Just a joy! Every time I see him on Numberphile, my life is made better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Stoll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Stoll https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU P.S. Cliff, we know you're on HN. Please continue being yourself, it seems like a really great person to be!
loco5niner 6y ago
> Of course, these days, he's the best dang Klein bottle glass blower in the game. And of course, he hires out the manufacturing. That's why he has (an awesome, little) warehouse under his hour full of them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU

munificent 6y ago

I can't find the quote now, but I recall Bill Bailey saying once that he's not a good enough musician to just play music and not funny enough to just be a comedian. But he's the funniest musician and the most musical comedian out there.

samplatt 6y ago
I think most of his fans would be willing to say that he's more than good enough at both, but that's looking at a career 35+ years in the making.

roystonvassey 6y ago

This is spot on. For a while, in my career, it felt like I was pursuing multiple career paths and in fact, there were many times I wondered if those were wasted years. Turns out, that being a fairly good jack of a few trades does pay off. A mix of knowledge of analytics, statistics that was honed through a few years in economic research and most importantly, business understanding. I see that all of these skills, together, help me understand and grasp problems much better. I am not the best cloud ops guy or the one with the best code or in-pace with the latest arxiv paper on machine learning but when faced with the latest business question on how to use data to help drive sales or reduce costs, I know enough to piece the different bits together and build a prototype at the least. This is hugely empowering. I owe it to luck and fortune of course, but when the opportunity presents I felt these cross-domain skills made me more confident and helped visualise the solution better. PS: I have not mentioned the most important skill though - how you work with people but I believe that is only gained through experience

amelius 6y ago

There are some problems with that though. Let's pick your first example and say you are a statistician/programmer. The problem is that whenever you talk to your peers, which are either better statisticians or better programmers, you will have a hard time earning their respect. Also, most people will know intuitively that it is easier to diversify than it is to specialize. And by combining skills you aren't going to make it into the history books. However, hard work in one area may actually get you there one day.

NikolaNovak 6y ago

I believe I read that article as well; but haven't been able to find it in a while; it's not pateo11 OR Malcolm Gladwell ;), but does anybody have a link to a blog/article that may have been the original source? Thx! :)

jacobwilliamroy 6y ago

devops

hatmatrix 6y ago

Jack of [many] trades, master of none.

collyw 6y ago
"T-shaped developer" master of one (or two).

pks016 6y ago

Coincidence; I discovered Cavestory few days back and I'm currently playing now.

arvinsim 6y ago

Been wondering about this. I built my career on focusing on the technical aspects of programming only. I feel that people who got domain knowledge were always better contributors even if their technical programming knowledge is not that great. Been contemplating on getting a masters on an interesting field but current economic climate is still uncertain.

divan 6y ago
Programming is not about coding or knowing technical intricacies. It’s a two step process: 1) understand the universe 2) explain it to the three years old Coding comes as a part of the second step, but domain knowledge is crucial for the first.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

I'm an OK developer, don't know anything but superficial about AI or parser combinators or compilers, and most of my work is building pages, forms, APIs and databases and has been for the past decade+. However, my experience doing that trick is very varied by now; I can do the trick in a handful of back-end languages, front-end frameworks, even native iOS. So yeah I'm nowhere near a rockstar developer, but I'm experienced, productive, pragmatic, etc. It won't make me ridiculously rich but I get by. That said, I could increase my income by going self-employed I guess.

collyw 6y ago
Sounds like me. Never gonna be rich, but doesn't look like I'll be out of a job any time soon.

regulation_d 6y ago

I agree in principle, though I think the example is telling. If the combination is valuable enough, in this case programmer/statistician, then we simply create a new field for you to compete in: data science.

mikorym 6y ago

> becoming a top tier statistician is hard > but the amount of work to become top tier in a combination of 2-3 fields is attainable by almost anyone I think this is general work advice and in that sense I think it makes sense; it holds even more for {x, programming}. From my perspective, specificity and personality is an important part of the creative process towards becoming an expert or otherwise accomplished in a field, or at least, a field that has some inventiveness to it. In other words, focusing on even fewer things than a field such as statistics. To use the statistics example, I view statistics, or at least applied statistics, from the point of view of multivariate statistics. This makes me quite ignorant towards frequentist statistics (no, I am not about to promote Bayesian statistics, which in my opinion is the word that often refers simply to the Bayes Theorem in the context of frequentist statistics) but with very clear reasons: 1. Normality doesn't really come into play in multivariate stats unless we are sampling randomly and without context. In multivariate stats, we actually tend to either use an exhaustive dataset or we sample contextually, or maybe uniformly along a geographical feature such as a riverbed. 2. Dependence of variables is why we resort to multivariate statistics in the first place. 3. Sample size, similar to 1.), is often not applicable. It does apply in the sense that a small matrix gives few insights. However, replicates in an experiment in frequentist statistics are used as a measure of internal variation in relation to between group variation. In multivariate stats you can do the analysis in complete ignorance of whether there are groups at all, or, you can use the groups in a similar way and consider replicates. But there are not hard conventions like having at least three replicates in order to define what variation means in the first place. In multivariate stats variation is a measure of variation between variables, not groups, and the principal components order variation in terms of new, virtual variables via eigenvectors. 4. For a combination of these reasons, the general application of different types of statistics, specifically frequentist statistics as opposed to multivariate statistics tend to change the whole field you are working in to start off with. Now, the reason for my elaborate story about differences in statistical approaches is that to be an expert in anything, I personally think is a journey towards discovering what makes your interests peculiar, or if you prefer another word, special. (Also, it depends on which experts you happen to be exposed to.) So, yes, of course it should be hard to be one of the best in anything, but I think a reasonable approach is to find the peculiarities of what you could become deeply committed to. Frequentist statistics is contextually difficult for me to be focused on, and that makes it difficult. However, once the central limit theorem gets introduced, I instead would venture towards it and then once again forget whether I even can ever have enough time to properly study sampling. After all, I wasn't the one to happen to work for Guinness. Beer, now that would be a good reason to study sampling.