14 ms·

Short fat engineers are undervalued

• wizardofmysore 6y ago
  Short and fat ones are in management.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• pb7 6y ago
  The article itself isn't about this but one could theorize that the headline taken literally is also likely true.
  • asmos7 6y ago
    came for hope - walked away disappointed.
  • vocram 6y ago
    And that’s true even more if they are bald and with a beard.
    • winter_blue 6y ago
      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 the mid-80s.) She reported him to HR, and obviously they didn’t do anything, since he was one of the most valuable engineers at the company. He had a great breadth of knowledge and experience, and was really good at what he did. So what you’re stating doesn’t necessarily always hold true.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • netrus 6y ago
        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.
        • edoceo 6y ago
          Hubris right? Gets you twice, every time.
    • wutbrodo 6y ago
      What?? Beards are discriminated against professionally?
      • pantalaimon 6y ago
        Depends on the length of the beard.
        • wutbrodo 6y ago
          Ah yea, that makes sense.
    • greggturkington 6y ago
      The balding greybeards are among the most respected engineers of my peers
      • hertzrat 6y ago
        But not necessarily when they apply for their next jobs, unfortunately
  • peter_l_downs 6y ago
    well, yeah, all engineers are under valued
  • kristopolous 6y ago
    Some clicking on google scholar shows academic literature supports the claim at least with regard to height. Maybe someone can find similar articles with weight (I couldn't find anything) https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2004-95165-004 https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2004-95165-004 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00288309 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00288309
  • the_only_law 6y ago
    Ngl for a minute before clicking I was slightly curious if this was some random study of the literal interpretation.
    • pb7 6y ago
      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.
      • christophilus 6y ago
        Invader Zim was prescient, it turns out.
      • renerthr 6y ago
        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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7378972
        • keybored 6y ago
          Yes, we all know that time when Musk decided to grow taller.
          • smnrchrds 6y ago
            Yes, we all know that time when Musk decided to grow t̶a̶l̶l̶e̶r̶ hair.
            • keybored 6y ago
              Fatness and lack of stature was the original topic.
  • jodrellblank 6y ago
    one could devil's advocate speculate the other way as well; e.g. If IQ declines with age, and exercise is a way to slow the decline[1], fatness could reflect lack of exercise and lifestyle which doesn't prioritise exercise, so would you expect to see lower value for fatter engineers in a pure meritocracy? If lower IQ correlates with obesity ("a 10‐point decrease in IQ was associated with a 1.10‐fold increase in the odds for obesity."[2]) either way - a lower IQ person is more likely to get fat, or the metabolic changes of getting fat negatively affect cognition as well - over a large group of skilled people would you expect thinner people to earn more? If height and IQ are correlated ("Taller people tend to be smarter. Although the relationship is modest, height and IQ are consistently correlated at ∼.10–.20"[3]), would, etc. [1] https://www.mdedge.com/neurology/article/193699/alzheimers-cognition/aerobic-exercise-may-mitigate-age-related-cognitive?sso=true https://www.mdedge.com/neurology/article/193699/alzheimers-c... [2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/lim2.11 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/lim2.11 [3] https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1003451 https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/jo...
    • ilaksh 6y ago
      Maybe revisit that comment in your mid 40s or 50s. Up until around age 35 or so, I was generally very lean and did not get noticably fat regardless of my lifestyle. I know I haven't gotten any stupider. Hormonal changes are the most likely difference for me.
      • jodrellblank 6y ago
        What difference does it make whether I am in the described groups or not? You can argue that IQ doesn't exist, or shouldn't affect engineer value, or that the correlations don't exist, but telling the author "you won't like it when it happens to you, so agree it doesn't exist" is weird. > "Up until around age 35 or so, I was generally very lean and did not get noticably fat regardless of my lifestyle." It's tempting to read this as saying "I didn't choose it to happen, so I'm excused from any negative effects", although that would be taking a negative view on it. But if not that, what else is this sentence here for? Maybe you're saying that there's more to fat than lifestyle - then skim read "Ten Putative Contributors to the Obesity Epidemic"[1] (PDF or online PDF) where they discuss things like viral infections, environmental triggers, socieo-economic contributers, and other things which aren't diet or exercise related. Does any of that change whether obesity does or doesn't correlate with IQ? Or maybe you're saying you got fat despite exercising - which only says exercise didn't save you, it doesn't need to change whether IQ and obesity are correlated or not. Plus exercise was suggested as a counter to age related decline, not as a counter to fat, only as a thing people might think when seeing fat. > "I know I haven't gotten any stupider." Who ever thinks they have? Would you honestly know? You ought to have lost some abilities just going from age 35 to 55 alone. See[2]: "Age and individual productivity: a literature survey" - "The ability levels of employed white men and women up to the age of 65, using data from the General Aptitude Test Battery collected in the U.S. from 1970-1984, is shown in Figure 2. These findings suggest a relatively sharp decline in most abilities, after maximum values are reached in the 20s and early 30s (Avolio and Waldman 1994). The decline of mental abilities from early adulthood is a universal phenomenon. The age-induced changes in cognitive abilities are similar across countries and within population subgroups, such as between men and women (Park et al. 1999, Maitland et al. 2000). Further individuals with high and low ability levels are subject to the same age-induced changes in cognitive functioning (Deary et al. 2000). Even among non-human species, ranging from fruit flies to primates, age-reductions in memory and learning capabilities have been observed (Minois and Bourg 1997, Bunk 2000)." [1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/40447388_Ten_Putative_Contributors_to_the_Obesity_Epidemic https://www.researchgate.net/publication/40447388_Ten_Putati... [2] https://www.demogr.mpg.de/papers/working/wp-2003-028.pdf https://www.demogr.mpg.de/papers/working/wp-2003-028.pdf
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • u678u 6y ago
    I'd agree if its most other jobs but I thought devs were one job where appearance doesn't matter as much?
    • gumby 6y ago
      Sadly, social forces apply to in person interviews.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • LandR 6y ago
      I think it applies to any job where you have to interview with someone face to face. Like it or not they are probably going to judge on your appearance.
  • mdeck_ 6y ago
    thatsthejoke.png
  • tenarchits 6y ago
    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/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2709415/
    • centimeter 6y ago
      I think it's definitely true that attractiveness indicators correlate with characteristics like intelligence. If you think about it, this shouldn't actually be that surprising; it would be silly if the factors that went into sexual selection had no correlation with survival-boosting traits.
      • wutbrodo 6y ago
        Hm, perhaps I'm reasoning about this correctly, but wouldn't you think the opposite? Being attractive provides evolutionary slack that requires less optimization on other characteristics (like intelligence), and vice versa.
        • dsr_ 6y ago
          Being judged attractive is a cultural thing that varies with time and place. Being judged intelligent is also a cultural thing that varies with time and place. Unless your culture is static for 20+ generations, don't expect much influence of it on evolution.
          • centimeter 6y ago
            There are attractiveness signifiers that are not culturally mediated (e.g. clear healthy skin is valued everywhere, extreme obesity or thinness is very rarely valued, being very short is very rarely valued, etc.) Intelligence also seems to have plenty of culture-independent aspects.
          • 6y ago
• wwww4all 6y ago
  The reality often goes against the premise of the article. What are accomplishments of tall.skinny vs short.fat engineers? Linux was driven by Linus T, javascript by Brendan E, Apple by 2 Steve’s, etc. Innovation and creativity are more highly valued, which are byproducts of short.skinny type.
  • grahamlee 6y ago
    The two Steves are a great example. Well, Steve W was an electronic engineer with a deep interest and understanding of electronics. But Steve J was the one who took calligraphy classes and realised that computers could benefit from multiple fonts.
  • wombatmobile 6y ago
    As usual with these types of articles, the advice in the maxim is asserted free of context. > On a long enough time line, wisdom is always more valuable than knowledge. In practice, context is everything. That’s why for every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert.
  • jfengel 6y ago
    Steve J is tall and skinny. Steve W is slightly shorter than average and fat. Linus is pretty much dead average, maybe a little tall and a little heavy. Brendan's the same height as Steve W, and was weight proportionate at the time, though he's put on weight since then.
• soneca 6y ago
  I am not sure that perspective will be widely shared, I am not even sure if I agree myself, but I do appreciate this post as I consider myself a short fat engineer.
• whoisjuan 6y ago
  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 generate more specific output that someone who knows a little of OpenGL and a lot of other things. However, there's always the counterargument that generalists can compensate with their holistic view and understanding of problems throughout the whole stack. I understand this and agree with it, but I think there's a point in every innovation where the generalist contribution declines sharply. And I'm saying this as a generalist. If you are a generalist and you feel undervalued, you're likely in the wrong project or too involved in phases of a project where your contribution can't move the needle significantly anymore.
  • jtxx 6y ago
    > you're likely in the wrong project or too involved in phases of a project where your contribution can't move the needle significantly anymore to expand on this, I've found most of my happiness as a generalist in early stage startups. to me, a larger company looking for a generalist with no concrete role is a sign that they don't have their stuff together. obviously there are exceptions to this rule - some companies just prefer generalists - but usually once teams get big enough, people settle into specific roles, even as a generalist.
    • alexjplant 6y ago
      > larger company looking for a generalist with no concrete role is a sign that they don't have their stuff together. Or that their culture is such that they have entrenched, stovepiped personnel that don't venture out of their specific knowledge domains and they need somebody to bridge that gap. An analogy that I've used far too often when describing software deployment in traditional orgs is one of the dev team and IT playing tennis with the grenade that is the software. With each volley back and forth they give each other nigh-useless information - the operations team will tell the dev team that it crashed without sending logs and that it's because of random setting X that they pulled out of a hat, then the dev team will tell the ops team that said configuration value is hardcoded but that can't be the problem because it runs perfectly on their dev machine, and so on and so forth. Having somebody to mediate this interaction so that it's actually productive is inherently invaluable to, y'know, getting actual work done. Unfortunately it's not particularly valuable from a business perspective because if your org is operating this way then it means that they place greater value on the performance of "software engineering" than the actual value added by the software produced. So basically what you said.
• AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  A friendly suggestion for the OP: An uppercase theta should be used for "Big Θ time complexity" regarding algorithms but for angles like in the article, it should be the lowercase theta that looks like this: θ.
• ironman1478 6y ago
  The valve employee handbook talks about the T shaped engineer (page 32) https://media.steampowered.com/apps/valve/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf https://media.steampowered.com/apps/valve/Valve_Handbook_Low...
  • stingraycharles 6y ago
    The article of this post also does. I’m unsure what point you’re trying to make?
    • ironman1478 6y ago
      Nothing! Just a cool factoid!
  • rzzzt 6y ago
    That's before their model is rigged properly.
  • redis_mlc 6y ago
    Valve's manual talks about expertise, not physical traits: "We value “T-shaped” people.That is, people who are both generalists (highly skilled at a broad set of valuable things—the top of the T) and also experts (among the best in their field within a narrow disci-pline—the vertical leg of the T). This recipe is important for success at Valve. We often have to pass on people who are very strong generalists with-out expertise, or vice versa. An expert who is too narrow has difficulty collaborating. A generalist who doesn’t go deep enough in a single area ends up on the margins, not really contributing as an individual."
• throwaway_dcnt 6y ago
  What about the squares amongst us?
• Ericson2314 6y ago
  Do "height on demand". Constant abstract and compress the knowledge so you can ramp up in any area as needed. Really, this is why programming languages are my "home base" of expertise. It's the study of formal ideas and their communication.
  • pcstl 6y ago
    This is also the strategy I tend to take. Strong, broad fundamentals so I can quickly pick up specifics on the job.
    • superbcarrot 6y ago
      This still restricts you from getting many of the jobs that require narrow specialization. Specializing on the fly only works to a certain extent and only if you get the opportunity to do so in the first place.
      • pcstl 6y ago
        In my experience, "narrow" professionals tend to heavily overestimate what they bring to the table, which makes them not very hard to outcompete.
        • username90 6y ago
          Switching technology is easy, switching domain is hard. You can't specialize in a technology, that is just nonsense, you specialize in a domain. Or several domains if they are simple enough. Like, the typical needs of a web product are simple enough that you master how to do the database, back end and front end. You wont be able to do the back end or database at Google scale, but you can master doing them at typical scale and I'd actually argue that Google scale is a different domain entirely with a different set of skills, you need a different specialist to handle that problem and he wont be able to efficiently solve your small scale needs either.
          • 6y ago
• robertbalent 6y ago
  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.
  • harpratap 6y ago
    Devops is more of T-shaped role rather than short-fat
    • sngz 6y ago
      devops isn't a role
  • satyrnein 6y ago
    "Full stack" (for whatever definition) is valued because it cuts down on coordination costs, but you may run into limits of what you can expect one person to know. Interestingly, as I've had to hire some "skinny" specialists, my Kanban board has gotten wider to coordinate between them.
    • treeman79 6y ago
      Jquery is horrible for many reasons. But it made it easy to be a full stack developer. Things are far more challenging these days.
  • alexjplant 6y ago
    > 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 whichever public cloud dominates the vertical the company operates in 2) Developers that don't actually develop but spend all of their time managing CI/CD pipelines, SCM, JIRA, etc. In either case their roles are obviously secondary to the developers that build actual solutions; they are the mechanics for the software engineers, which inherently means that their contribution to the value stream is not holistic and it's just another way of enforcing the traditional dichotomy between people that build solutions (developers) and people that keep them from falling over (operations). I've held the title of "DevOps Engineer" at least once professionally and when I would talk to recruiters or new employers about a software engineering position they'd often ask me what "got me into DevOps" or why I'm trying to "get back into coding". If you know and like working with dev tools and infrastructure then my advice to you is to be a Software Engineer that does DevOps, not a "DevOps Engineer".
• homeless_engi 6y ago
  Not sure I agree. A "short fat" could theoretically be replaced by a group of "short skinny", whereas a "tall skinny" could only be replaced by another "tall skinny". As value is largely determined by scarcity (supply and demand), this would cause "short fat" to be of lower value.
  • pb7 6y ago
    It depends on how depth of knowledge is measured. One is considered an expert in a niche because they know it inside and out. But in theory, multiple people with a disjoint subset of knowledge of the niche could also be a reasonable replacement?
  • akvadrako 6y ago
    So you're saying one engineer who's good at lots of things can be replaced by a dozen engineers who are only good at one thing? It doesn't work that way because coordination costs are a big part of the cost.
• bagrow 6y ago
  A short fat engineer is likely a dilettante.
• nullspace 6y ago
  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 the r. I think that with the perspectives that short fat engineers have, they can play enormous roles as "PM" or "Engineering Manager", and definitely as ICs during early stages of startups. But they clearly don't enjoy depth, and this can be counter-productive for that 1% of the time where you really, really want depth. I don't buy the knowledge vs wisdom thing though, there's plenty of wisdom to be gained from going deep into a subject. I'd actually claim that wisdom can only come from depth - though what depth means is different for different roles.
  • treis 6y ago
    >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.
    • andrewflnr 6y ago
      On the spectrum from compilers to machine learning to frontend, there are plenty of technologies.
    • bradlys 6y ago
      > 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. That's kinda how SV is these days though. It's very common for engineers to jump companies every 1-2 years for a long period of time and the companies very frequently undergo a shift in technologies while engineers are there. So, unless you join FAANG or some super stable company - I could see it being natural from just how the market works that you end up having a very short fat engineering career. For myself, the only consistent thing from my five jobs over the last 7-8 years is that they've all had JavaScript (actually - one had CoffeeScript but then we migrated to JavaScript when I was leaving) - but that's mostly just because of the nature of web development. In the middle of my sixth job search right now and it's looking to be a backend role that won't be in JS now. So, there goes that stability... Personally: fullstack LAMP -> fullstack Python + Django -> frontend role with backbone/knockout/angular and majority of vanilla JS and CSS -> fullstack Python + Django + CoffeeScript -> Fullstack Angular + Node -> Backend Node with shift to TypeScript near the end
• shadowgovt 6y ago
  I think this article underestimates a risk of the "short fat" information spectrum. People who think they know something are more likely to be wrong than people who don't think they know anything on a topic. There's a "competence gap" between knowing you know nothing and actually having deep knowledge; it's the "just enough to be dangerous" zone. Depending on how tall precisely "short fat" is, that can describe an engineer that, more often than not, makes the wrong choice because they know enough to have opinions but those opinions are raw.
• dangwu 6y ago
  The point that "on a long enough time line, wisdom is always more valuable than knowledge" is pretty irrelevant to tech companies. They hire engineers to get stuff done quickly - not slowly gather "wisdom". The average tenure at a tech company continues to be a few years. Also, I've noticed that entry-to-mid level jobs are great for "short and fat" engineers, but once you start aiming for senior (or higher) level IC positions, job interviews require you to be an expert in whatever field the position you’re interviewing for is in. If you stay "short and fat", you're setting your career trajectory up for failure.
  • 20thCB 6y ago
    Gotta laugh at the HN definition of "failure". Plenty of "short and fat" jobs provide a good career. Not everyone wants or needs anything else.
    • EvilEy3 6y ago
      Gotta laugh at your definition of "good career". Plenty of "short and fat" jobs provide relatively failed career. Not everyone wants or needs anything else.
  • superbcarrot 6y ago
    > If you stay "short and fat", you're setting your career trajectory up for failure. Is staying short and fat really an option? Aren't you always specialising in the problem domain / tech stack that you're currently working with?
    • dangwu 6y ago
      Not if you keep switching teams or companies every few years into something new.
  • lamontcg 6y ago
    I tend to see a lot of highly promoted "short and fat" principal engineers and other internal thought leaders who lack depth. In fact the career path seems to top out if you prefer being an expert in something rather than jack of all trades and able to talk about any subject.
• elil17 6y ago
  Practical question: I have a short, fat resume (e.g. MechE degree, work experience in AI, UX, manufacturing, academic research, and writing). What industries/companies/roles will value this skill set the most? Where can short, fat people find opportunities?
  • mrwoggle 6y ago
    Wouldn't that be startups? Maybe a hardware startup since you are a MechE.
• the_only_law 6y ago
  I guess I’m relatively fat, but not really. I’ve done a lot of surface level research/ on stuff that no one uses or really cares about. Ive always been amazed by the “tall” devs and have one or twice (or more than I’d like to admit) tried to deep dive something always eventually giving up because I have no idea where to obtain the deeper knowledge. Perhaps more realistically, I just have a different type of fat.
• annoyingnoob 6y ago
  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.
  • ellisv 6y ago
    I feel very funnel/inverse-triangle shaped.
  • throwaway856437 6y ago
    That's called being old. Generally considered out of date, unable to learn new stuff :-)
    • annoyingnoob 6y ago
      Yet, always held a job, so far never part of a layoff, still pulling my weight. If you are not constantly learning then you are falling behind. The biggest differences from my younger days are more distractions in my personal life (family), and I make better decisions than I once did.
    • jmchuster 6y ago
      It depends, if your "master of many" list is all old technologies, or all new technologies.
      • throwaway856437 6y ago
        How about the newest version of an old technology
        • jmchuster 6y ago
          I mean, all that really matters is if your list of technologies matches up with what the company currently uses and what they would aspirationally like to use in the future.
  • 6y ago
• throwaway2245 6y ago
  People who have broad interests with no depth of knowledge have not identified (for themselves) where their value lies. I would imagine that this type of engineer needs to be carefully managed to stay on tasks that add business-value. As such, it's not unfair that they are seen as juniors. They are juniors.
  • pcstl 6y ago
    People whose value lies in coordination often need to dabble in multiple fields. Think of a technical artist in a game company.
    • throwaway2245 6y ago
      I would count coordination here as a deep technical skill, which requires a depth of study and/or experience. You are selling your coordination skills. It's the stick of the T.
      • pcstl 6y ago
        I don't think there are too many people around who actually have no deep skill. That usually doesn't hold up too well in the job market.
• bluefirebrand 6y ago
  "Junior in every department" really struck hard for me. I know just enough of basically everything to get by or as a starting point, but I lack that really deep knowledge that comes from using a small group of skills and tools for years. I feel that switching languages and frameworks and tools and OSes a bunch of times early in my career has really held me back. I don't mind supporting my team, what I don't like is how companies will structure an entire team as support around one or two people. I am not a rock star but I am still capable of contributing more than "support". I want to build real features. Especially when I know I'm capable of doing the things those devs do, just maybe not at the speed they do.
  • pkaye 6y ago
    How big a team are you working in? In most places I've worked the teams (or company) were small enough that even new hires would get a change to work on something big if they have the capacity.
    • bluefirebrand 6y ago
      I have basically always been on teams of 5 devs. Maintaining legacy stuff.
  • the_only_law 6y ago
    I’m in a similar position, albeit mostly because even though my professional career has been predominantly one stack, there’s just no real chance to ever really get to learn the ecosystem. Most of the work hasn’t called for me learning much of an ecosystem, especially since in very bureaucratic environment, a lot of it is simply delegated to someone else. I often half joke about how I don’t know any programming languages which is unfortunately kinda of true. I’ve toyed with a lot of languages, including ones that your average developer may not have even heard of, but at the end of the day it’s just toying.
  • hackissimo123 6y ago
    I'm in the opposite position; I've spent almost my entire five-year career focusing on one quite narrow tech stack and I'm good at it but I'm also sick of it and desperate to learn something new. I just changed jobs and I took a substantial pay cut for the chance to get professional experience in a new tech stack, which isn't ideal, but I really want to work with a new language and I don't know what else to do (there was no possibility of diversifying at my previous position.) My point is that both the "short and fat" and "spikey" approaches have their pros and cons.
• meheleventyone 6y ago
  None of these things exist. A taxonomy of three kinds is entirely inadequate to describe the potential of anyone working today. These sorts of quick fix mental models are pretty poisonous. There are literally recommendations for all three saying how useful they are. This is some of the dumbest snake oil to infect software development.
  • x86ARMsRace 6y ago
    All these sorts of things were cooked up in the depths of some HR department somewhere, likely by people who fundamentally don't understand technical skillsets. They provide some level of false utility by allowing people to compartmentalize otherwise highly complex systems (knowledge sets) into simple ideas. Skillsets are highly complex assemblies that can't be summed up or generalized. Doing things like that give us the hilariously misguided strategies that make HR folks hand out Myers Briggs tests for culture fit checks. I know for myself that a lot of my skills are actually just fancy applications of thought processes and theory, expressed in code. Trying to box that into this goofy trichotomy will just confuse someone.
  • superbcarrot 6y ago
    The point isn't a taxonomy of 3 types but the layout in two axes - breadth and depth of expertise. Those are quite real and useful to think about when considering hiring or your own career development.
    • meheleventyone 6y ago
      Right but no one actually measures what real distributions look like. They just invent some shapes with stories attached they like. Then the misguided try to lump people into them.
• kypro 6y ago
  No sources and a lot of assertions here. I'm not sure how true this is tbh. Some of the best TAs I've worked with have a very broad knowledge of a lot of technologies, without being much of an expert in any specific technology. I'm also personally somewhere between a tall-skinny and t-shaped engineer. Admittedly jobs seem to be a little harder to come by, but there are some jobs (especially with small startups) that really appreciate engineers who have a wide range of skills. I'd love to see some data, confirming this. I suspect OP is right, but I don't think "short and fat" engineers are under valued as a rule, it's more that 90% of the time companies are looking to hire someone with a very specific skillset to fill a very specific role.
• philosopher1234 6y ago
  Wisdom comes from depth and breadth not breadth alone. That initial bolder claim was a major turn off for me. The “wisdom” you get from breadth is the same kind of “wisdom” you get from seeing a lot of faces go by on the street. It’s surface level, and mostly wrong.
• standardUser 6y ago
  And what about us short, skinny engineers? I guess we're just happy to be here.
• hprotagonist 6y ago
  at this point i'm Π-shaped.
• lmilcin 6y ago
  (removed)
  • Zababa 6y ago
    The article is not about physical appearance though.
  • pcstl 6y ago
    That's not what the article is about, though
• shaggyfrog 6y ago
  Egads. The term is "generalist", and has been for decades. No one would or should say "short & fat". And yes, generalists are undervalued.
• theodric 6y ago
  My wife likes me so
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• dv_dt 6y ago
  Worst part is so many interview processes value skinny engineers who are tall enough to drop balls into 20 minute cs algorithm baskets.
• zabzonk 6y ago
  How about "tall and fat" (square)? I'd consider myself fairly expert in C and C++, SQL, Windows programming, UNIX/Linux in general, Delphi and a few other technologies, in that quite a few people have paid me for writing important applications using them, teaching them and writing about them.
  • bjourne 6y ago
    Then, according to this dumb pop psych thing, you are autistic and not a good fit for the job market.
  • wutbrodo 6y ago
    It seems pretty clear that the model is relative to "total surface area". What you call a "tall and fat" square may be "short and skinny" relative to someone else's bar, but now we're just talking about total level of skill, which isn't really relevant.
    • zabzonk 6y ago
      I am saying you can be highly skilled in multiple technologies. Do you disagree with that?
      • wutbrodo 6y ago
        I'm saying that highly-skilled is a relative term.
• jppope 6y ago
  Great title. Great article.
• danenania 6y ago
  A possible problem with ‘wisdom’ in this sense is that it doesn’t always stack well, whereas deep knowledge usually does. A wise generalist manager deftly guiding the skills of a bunch of deep specialists probably makes for a great team, and a team that can be expanded without much friction. A team with too many ‘wise’ people (or people who perceive themselves that way) might just waste all day arguing.
• yuy910616 6y ago
  my theory: depth == salary, width == mobility. depth is risky - when time is right, you make a ton of money; opposite also true. width is a hedge - you don't get paid as much, but you can land a job quickly, because you can plug into any team
  • wutbrodo 6y ago
    > width is hedge - you don't get paid as much, but you can land a job quickly, because you can plug into any team I generally like your model, but mobility is upstream of salary too. If you're very intentional about your career, mobility is the ace up your sleeve, letting you slot into the places you need to to maximize your current and future salary. I've always been a pretty width-first engineer; it just fits my personality. But time and again, I've been able to open doors for myself because my established excellence in one area provided an "insurance policy" for teams to take a chance on me working in another (in-demand, specialized) area. After the first iteration or two, it's been a virtuous cycle, where I make lots of money with my established skill in the currently-hot thing and trade off a small portion of that to grow the skill in the next-to-be-hot thing. Though perhaps this doesn't generalize well. I've been studying/working in AI for well over a decade and it's been a remarkable boom for my chosen field. Perhaps during the next AI winter, I'll have to face the depth/width trade-off a little more directly. But even in that case, it seems like width maximizes my expected salary.
    • yuy910616 6y ago
      You're absolutely correct. Great insight that mobility also increases salary! Can I rubber duck you with another question? As someone who is also trying to maximize mobility and width, how do you feel about the idea of "it's not who you know vs what you know, it's who knows what you know"? In other words, when you move teams/jobs, how to you gain credibility? Do you do anything to promote/show your 'track record'?
• notjustanymike 6y ago
  Think of an engineering team like a DnD group. You need a tank (wide), DPS (narrow), buff / debuff (QA), wizard (designer), and more. Going all wide or all narrow is a recipe for a team wipe.
  • btown 6y ago
    Unless, to expand the metaphor to MMORPGs, you’re trying to solo (read: ramen startup) non-current content (read: disrupt an industry that has lagged in technical innovation, meaning you don’t need deep technical innovations but you do need broad agility). The “short fat engineer” is the early-career nothing-to-lose startup founder, and that’s a vital role that is arguably correctly valued by our industry in recent decades.
• xiphias2 6y ago
  Why would a generalist be wiser than somebody who is able to go into depth and understand the ugly details of a project? That is what the T-shaped thinking is about. Elon Musk is a great example who is able to answer deep technical questions on many subjects, and I think he needs people who understand their own project deeply, not ,,short fat'' engineers.
  • approxim8ion 6y ago
    Elon Musk is a hack, and his "deep technical" answers are either pre-prepared or appear deep and technical to people outside of the fields.
• lordnacho 6y ago
  I think there's some dynamics at play here that obscure the situation. First of all, there's a tendency for depth engineers to be more visible. But this is extreme; there's a handful of top names in StackOverflow for a tag like csharp or django, but that doesn't mean number 1000 in a given tag is an amateur at it, he's likely pretty good. Similarly, not everyone writes respected blogs, but the people who do tend to be ones who spent a heck of a lot of time in one niche. That doesn't mean you need a known blogger for your project. Second, there's a tendency for hiring firms to want a dev fully trained in some vertical. This may sound sensible but often isn't. If you have some person who did a lot of work in RoR, but you have a Py/Django project, couldn't you expect him to get up to speed reasonably quickly? I think in a lot of cases, yes. Whether you'll be allowed to take that risk depends on the situation, and often you won't be. This works the other way too: a lot of devs will decide not to bother applying. Third, diminishing returns. Like a lot of knowledge stuff, there's a sort of pareto principle here. You can learn most of anything in way under half the time to learn the whole thing, if that's even possible. If your project is not super specialized in one vertical, but still requires a lot of verticals, you benefit from having a guy who knows a lot about a lot of stuff.
  • bogwog 6y ago
    > If you have some person who did a lot of work in RoR, but you have a Py/Django project, couldn't you expect him to get up to speed reasonably quickly? I wonder what is the average time for an experienced engineer to transition into a different, but similar technology (like RoR -> Django) and be able to work productively in it. It can’t be very long. Maybe 2 weeks? If you had a number, you could calculate the costs as part of a standard onboarding process. You’d just need to make sure that you hire someone who can demonstrate a willingness to learn the new thing. This seems like it could be much cheaper than hiring an expert with the most years of experience in the particular combination of technologies in your stack, without compromising on quality. And the perspective from someone with a breadth of knowledge is more likely to yield innovations that provide your company/project with a competitive advantage, compared to the expert that has been working on the same thing for many years.
    • 6y ago
• Benjammer 6y ago
  Remember the adage: A specialist will tend to underestimate how much a generalist can accomplish, when they choose to specialize, and a generalist will tend to underestimate how deep any given specialty really goes.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• rusabd 6y ago
  Interesting choice of words. I might consider invest in named engineers, is there EFT for them?
• Nimitz14 6y ago
  Bad article. Noone is just an expert in one thing and can't do anything else. What actually happens is by becoming an expert at something you also learn things that will help you elsewhere, which means you can pick up other things more quickly. So the choice is either between someone who is an expert in a one thing and knows a bunch of other things, or someone who just knows of bunch of things.
• solumos 6y ago
  Looking at the author's background, it's easier to say generalists are undervalued when you're a freelancer/agency - you kind of have the freedom to work on projects for 3-6 months, punt them, and move on to the next. When you're a bigger product organization, more specialized approaches can work better since you're better suited to find the right trade-off of "speed" vs "future-proofness". This can backfire too though - many specialists can get lost in the weeds and over-engineer solutions that can cripple a business with maintenance costs simply because they want to increase their depth. I think this entire contextualization is kind of ridiculous though. If you were to categorize short fat vs tall skinny vs T, you might see something like: fullstack eng vs ML researcher vs backend engineer w/ ETL experience The fact is that fullstacks _are_ utility players. I don't know that they're really at liberty to "take the helm" if they're not well-versed in the technology that differentiates the company (or team).
• opportune 6y ago
  This falls victim to the fallacy that everybody has a fixed number of points to allocate across skills. To torture the analogy, the reality is some people are huge squares and some are tiny slivers. Or a fat fork or some other weird shape. Basically, some people are just better than you at everything. The other thing is that you often just need problem solvers where it doesn’t even matter how wide their experience is. You just need someone who knows the basics and is adaptable.
• iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago
  What I've observed is that people have an easier time when they can assign you a label that fits with their world view. Depth (for some value or depth) provides the tag that (lazy) managers, hr, etc need to understand where you will fit. If you can do a range of stuff, even well, people aren't sure what to do with that, and so often end up focusing on someone else. I saw that a lot in consulting, where people with what would objectively be a very superficial skillset in some area or another "branded" themselves as being a deep expert, and became the go-to for anything that was perceived as relating to their area. So I would maybe rephrase as "skinny engineers brand more easily"
• ilaksh 6y ago
  I thought this was going to be about salary discrepancies between people with different physical characteristics. Someone should study that.
• ilaksh 6y ago
  In my opinion, for most projects what's necessary is to approach from a broadly informed perspective and then dive deep into multiple potential solution strategies to see what direction will work well. Then dive even deeper into the details related to the architecture you have chosen. The problem with focusing too much on one area is that you can only deal with one particular type of problem and maybe only with one particular type of solution.
• username90 6y ago
  > Both dimensions can be useful; but breadth gives us perspective, and thus wisdom No, it really doesn't. If you haven't ever gone through the work required to become great at something then you lack that perspective completely. If you have gone through that journey at least once you start seeing that journey in other domains as well which gives you a lot of understanding about the field, about engineers, about what projects actually require etc. I really don't see how you can be considered wise without having seen that, not as a software engineer at least. Maybe you could be a great product manager though.
• naebother 6y ago
  Expressing ideas as pseudo-graphs is overvalued.
• GuB-42 6y ago
  Good "short fat engineers" are not undervalued at all, the reason they are not hired often is because they are the boss! A wide profile is typically what you want as a boss/executive/entrepreneur. With technical knowledge but also artistic, legal, people and of course business skills. This is what you need to run a company. And as you reach your limits, you start to hire experts.
  • satyrnein 6y ago
    Exactly! At the bottom of the organization, your boss can be better than you on all dimensions. Towards the top, you are better than your boss at your job. It gets wider and wider, culminating in a CEO who is worse at tech than the CTO, worse at finance than the CFO, etc. At those levels, your actual skill is in driving experts to results.
• jbluepolarbear 6y ago
  I made an account to give my perspective. I call my self a generalist because I don’t know the correct term. You can put me on any team and I can learn, adapt, and improve any system you put me on. I’m not the best at coming up with new ideas, but I can take any idea, implementation, etc and combine them all to fit whatever need. I tend to build systems, make them stable, teach people the how and why, and then move on to another project. I thrive at companies that allow me to choose my projects and allow me to learn and build new things.
• peach45 6y ago
  This is shortsighted. The reason deep knowledge is more valuable is that learning anything stops being fun, and therefore presents less of a biological pull, after the first few milestones. There's a logarithmic decay in reward to effort put in. So naturally you're going to want engineers that have put in the hard work to build their knowledge, rather than the posers who read about engineering but never actually got into the nitty gritty. Why? Because it becomes rare, and scarcity drives up value. Simple! EXAMPLE: Why would I care if my plumber also moonlights as a surgeon if all I care about is getting my faucet fixed without him passing the buck due to perceived complexity? Those things are great in a dinner party setting, but in the professional workplace you want professionals not dabblers. Whenever I meet a self styled "generalist" nowadays I scoff. It's not hard to read HN daily and pick up on the lingo and memes and fake your way to 99% of a "generalist" in both knowledge and impression, but that doesn't make one a good engineer.
  • kelnos 6y ago
    I think your premise is flawed. Generalists are not "dabblers". They are professionals just as much as specialists are. Either you have a very odd (and incorrect) view of how software development is done, or you're presenting a straw man that doesn't have anything to do with the article's premise. I find most specialists useless when it comes to architecting and building a full system, and often when they are a part of a team, focused on their specialty, they build in a way that is difficult to fit into the whole. Obviously there are good things, too: my knowledge of things like data science and graphics is limited; if a part of a project called for deep knowledge in those areas, I'd be happy to have a specialist on the team. But unless they are more of the "T-shaped" type the article talks about, they need a lot of hand-holding when it comes to anything outside their domain. Generalists bridge that gap, and handle necessary concerns that most specialists don't even consider, let alone know how to handle. (Full disclosure: I consider myself a generalist, though at times I have ended up diving deep into particular areas when projects have required it.)
  • nucleardog 6y ago
    You’re not arguing against a generalist (varying depth over a handful or many areas), you’re describing, sure, let’s call it a poser or dabbler (little to no depth in any area).
• harikb 6y ago
  Looking at their illustrations reminds me of Tetris. I guess it is just like in Tetris - we need the right mix of vertical, horizontal, and T shaped pieces or we are screwed!
• Quarrelsome 6y ago
  but isn't the best team to have one of each of the shapes? Why do we have to choose which shape is the best?
• iujjkfjdkkdkf 6y ago
  I would add that deep skills, especially when expressed in years of experience, are often indicative of having worked in a bubble, and may not even generalize to other applications of the same tech. Cases where someone has actually gotten progressively "deeper" as they continue to work in the same area are (anecdotally) outliers. It's much more common to have just spend a lot of time doing more of the same.
• microtherion 6y ago
  I suppose the paradigm for aging engineers like me would be "crumbling dock" rather than "T shaped": Quite a bit of breadth, with depth in various places, except that when you rely too much on it, you may find out that some of it has rotted away in the mean time.
• hintymad 6y ago
  Specialist vs generalist is a false bifurcation in the article's context. There's really just one dimension: influence. You have only breadth but you can convince teams to move in the direction you like, and you will be valued. You have depth yet the depth is of no use to solve your team's challenges, then your depth will not be valued.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• systematical 6y ago
  Is there any data to back up the claim the author makes? Otherwise, this looks like little more than a long tweet.
• ehnto 6y ago
  One hidden risk with adopting industry leading technology at smaller businesses is that you unintentionally select for tools that favor specialists, and that is harder to hire for and less useful for an early or small business.
• KingOfCoders 6y ago
  I always thought pi "shaped" knowledge is best, as it helps you build networks interlocking like proteins.
• kumarvvr 6y ago
  The most successful engineers, to me, seem to be the ones who rise about the lower levels of technology and abstract out minor details. They understand what the technology in question can do and cannot do. They know what other technologies can be paired and cannot be paired with the current one and they understand the performance, development, deployment and maintenance aspects of all the combinations. They can then design applications or platforms, learning as they go. Take, for example NodeJS. Ryan knows what V8 is capable of, knows what it's not capable of outside the browser sandbox, and built himself an alternate sandbox. The implementation details, while complex, are minor in the grand scheme of things.
  • neal_jones 6y ago
    I’ve always felt understanding the broader context of technologies is one of the hardest things.
• dogbox 6y ago
  For further in-depth reading, I recommend the book "Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World". It explores the generalist vs specialist dichotomy within various fields (e.g. sports, music, engineering) and compares the successes and contributions between the two. As you might guess from the title, the book reaches a very similar conclusion - for spaces involving unstructured problem solving such as engineering, breadth lends itself better to creativity and achieving breakthroughs.
• xupybd 6y ago
  As a tall fat engineer I wish that described my technical ability not my physical appearance.
• notoriousarun 6y ago
  Specialisation is the exception, not the rule. > Everyone should read "Range By David Epstein" https://www.amazon.com/Range-Generalists-Triumph-Specialized-World/dp/0735214484?dchild=1&keywords=range&qid=1613210249&sr=8-1&linkCode=ll1&tag=amazonpurch08-20&linkId=af13ec04a290a64559e7f315a391308a&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl https://www.amazon.com/Range-Generalists-Triumph-Specialized... > In most fields, especially those that are complex and unpredictable. Generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel.
• marksbrown 6y ago
  Jack of all trades, master of none but sometimes better than one.
• agounaris 6y ago
  This could be one of the reasons why tech interviews are awkward. Most of them are "optimised" for tall and fat engineers but what you actually get is "luck of the draw" T shaped engineers on random specialties that you may not even need, with the assumption that the T shaped engineer can be transformed on demand to a short and fat or tall and skinny.
• cryptica 6y ago
  Everyone should aim to be T-shaped. The problem with 'tall skinny' engineers is that they can be extremely dangerous because: - Their deep domain knowledge makes them sound a lot smarter than they are... Especially to non tech-savvy managers who don't know better. So they can be extremely persuasive in arguments. They only participate in arguments that they can win but their ability to constantly win those niche arguments gives them extra general credibility which is not deserved. - They are excellent at implementing solutions within their narrow area of expertise but they tend to miss a lot of alternative solutions which may have been better. They could spend years working on a solution whose problem could have been solved much faster and more elegantly via a different solution which happens to lie outside of that individual's immediate domain of expertise. People who wield absolute top-of-the-range, world-class hammers but have no other tool in their toolbox have a very strong incentive to see and portray every problem as a nail.
• EvilEy3 6y ago
  A lot of sounds words without anything concrete. What is wisdom? How do you quantify it? Why "short far" engineer can have it and why T-shaped or "skinny" engineer can't have it? What makes someone "short and fat" valuable compared to other types?
• diedyesterday 6y ago
  Yeah exactly! That "undervaluing" is what initiated that whole fuck-up at the Jurassic Park :)