11 ms·

T-Shaped People and Academia

118 points by Pseudomanifold 5y ago

forrestthewoods 5y ago
Interesting. If academia prioritizes “I shaped” is it fair to say that industry prioritizes “T shapers”? That’s certainly been my experience. Although industry does want deep expertise in one area. I’ve heard a lot of companies explicitly recruit T-shaped individuals. But I’ve never heard the opposite.
atemerev 5y ago
T-shaped is so 2002. Today, we need Ш-shaped people!
mrVentures 5y ago
What's the point in even dividing people between such silly categories? I understand the context within a metaphor but when the author starts saying things like, 'every successful team I have been on had a t-shaped person' , it just seems absurdly reductive.
- tomrod 5y ago
  T-types are defined as those that increase a team's agility. Saying the definition each time would be cumbersome,so we package the connotation up into an idiom and move on. Generalizations can make for identification of useful patterns. Sometimes, the identification is pareidolia. Sometimes, it works. Tools of science and philosophy help us move that along. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia
  - airstrike 5y ago
    > T-types are defined as those that increase a team's agility. …according to some model of the work which may be entirely inaccurate, I think is the point the parent is making.
  - zamadatix 5y ago
    > T-types are defined as those that increase a team's agility. That's not how they are defined in the article or the detailed definition it links to. The definitions there define traits of someone who may be able to increase the agility of a team depending on the team and what it is doing but the same could be said for most types of people yet not all are T-shaped and vice versa.
- ironmagma 5y ago
  Everyone is T-shaped, so this verbiage is baffling. There’s not a single person alive who only knows about, say, dogs and nothing else.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    Yeah. T-shaped is part of the corporate BS lingo. It is meaningless and it has a shallow appeal of something more profound than it ostensibly is. If you really think about it, everyone is T shaped or more like a root of a tree with depth in various aspects of their career. It is also time dependent. In 2011, I knew a lot about computation fluid dynamics. Today, not so much. The whole thing is a fad. Unrelated but there are a lot of things like this in the startup world as well. For example, Elon keeps saying all you need to do is find out what arrangement atoms need to be in and then figure out how to do it. Yeah, no shit. Drug discovery is just sticking the right atoms together? Or software engineering is just pressing the right keys on the keyboard and Michael Phelps is just modulating the right muscles at the right time? It sounds more profound than it really is. It is also completely unactionable and impractical.
    - oriolid 5y ago
      The part about Elon Musk could just mean that he is not as T-shaped as he thinks he is.
  - Topolomancer 5y ago
    Author here---fully agree with you and alluded to that in the footnotes. Of course, a single letter is insufficient to capture human variation. The 'T' is taken to mean researchers that are not only willing to become an expert in a single topic of their choice, but that are capable of collaborating across disciplines, or investing additional resources in the things that are not commonly 'rewarded' in academia but still necessary (foundational work behind the scenes, or the community-building that another comment mentioned).
- drawkbox 5y ago
  From the footnotes: > There is a veritable zoo of characters of the alphabet, trying to capture the elusive properties of people out there in the real world. It should be understood that I do not even for a second think that one pithy letter is sufficient to describe a real person; all of these characterisations are merely hinting towards certain properties. As always in real life, there are many different shades on a spectrum to consider here T-shaped is somewhat generalized because over time people like this become more. Overall they are great for the start of projects and long term because they do what is necessary to ship products and projects. > Over time, one might think that a T-shaped person thus turns into a comb-like pattern. As far as I understand, this has not been studied yet by ethnographers. Maybe the term ‘serial experts’ would also been appropriate, except for its unfortunate similarity to the criminal world. The author states T-shaped people become the glue or "scaffolding" for a successful project. > Ts as multipliers. Throughout my career, the most impactful projects always had a T-shaped person onboard. This person would usually not be an expert in the subject matter, but would be able to provide the direly-needed scaffolding and foundation of a project that is all too often ignored in the initial phase, until it comes back later on with full swing to wreak havoc In my experience, T-shaped people can and do become experts of product, these are people more willing to make things work and ship projects over just focusing on their own goals or field of study solely. T-shaped people become product experts as they have seen more areas or earlier parts of the whole. T-shaped people can take a project from start to finish due to them being product/market experts from their involvement in more than just one area. Startups seem to operate and start best with T-shaped. In game development, good game projects and interactive projects especially Ts are prevalent. In game development for instance, Valve prefers T-shaped employees, generalists in many areas but deeper knowledge in one more more areas, people willing to help ship.[1] Even if later you have to get more depth in certain areas like rendering, networking, animation, audio or even branding/marketing, Ts are the trails that form that can later be upgraded or refined if needed. Ts are the root of self-organizing teams and companies like Valve. Valve has a good take on the balance for T-shaped people that help ship games [1]. These types area willing to wear different hats even if it isn't in the area they want to be their main focus. The mere understanding of those areas from experience in them, can make their main focus more finely tuned to work and mesh with the product. > 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 discipline—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 without 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 Too much specialization can be bad for projects and people, especially early on. Though by definition Ts would have a one or more deeper knowledge skillsets and can bounce between I-shaped and T-shaped without issue. For startups, games, apps, content, even entrepreneurship or sole-proprietors to small companies, T-shaped is the way it has to be in most cases. Everyone is somewhat T-shaped, it is a sliding scale. For academics at the Masters/Phd level, being T-shaped may actually be harmful or even hidden on applications because the nature of academics is the deeper I-shaped focus, you are trying to further the deeper detail of some subject. I bet lots of more broad generalists leave this off their descriptions/applications because of the bias against it. Everyone is T-shaped, just some are more willing to do different roles and wear different hats. It is a balance of being a leader in their chosen subject, but also wanting to get their foot in the door. A T-shaped person can be an expert still, and in many areas, but stating too much generalization may lead to bias in academia as this article summarizes. [1] Valve Employee Handbook (page 46) https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployeeHandbook.pdf https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployee...
- Topolomancer 5y ago
  Author here---I agree with the silliness of these categories, but I found no better way of phrasing this in an abstract manner. In the teams I mentioned in the article, it was super helpful to have that one colleague who knew a bit about software development, about running code in an HPC environment, about automated testing etc. Yes, these skills might be commonplace somewhere else, but in academia, they are typically not. Moreover, there are no incentives around for people to improve their knowledge in these tangential or broader areas. They might even be 'punished' for it later on since their research output ostensibly suffers.
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    That person is usually called a "developer." Historically, it's a technician's job. Of course it's super useful to have someone on an experimental physics team who can personally machine metal, blow glass, and repair broken electronics, but generally you try to leave that to specialists. The people who built CERN are not the same as the people who designed CERN are not the same as the people who did the research that made something like CERN plausible. Your attitude seems to be "Well - ML, web design, graphics, original research, it's all computers so why not?" There's a reason Peter Higgs didn't operate a concrete mixer, and that's because it wasn't his job. It's the same in CS. This kind of work should be handed over to someone who can work on it full time, so researchers can get on with research full time.
    - Topolomancer 5y ago
      > Your attitude seems to be "Well - ML, web design, graphics, original research, it's all computers so why not?" > > There's a reason Peter Higgs didn't operate a concrete mixer, and that's because it wasn't his job. That's not what I meant at all, though. I realise that my perspective might be specific to machine learning research: here, most papers involve implementations, prototypes, etc. My point could be boiled down to the following: if you have a candidate with fewer papers but _also_ some knowledge on how to, for instance, write clean code (or at least clean_er_ code), that candidate can be an asset _just as much_ as the candidate going into a Ph.D. with 10 first-author papers already. Both candidates cover different aspects of the research area. I am saying that it's a good idea to look beyond `$num_papers` as a metric when hiring budding Ph.D. students, being well aware of their respective responsibilities. Current hiring practice in academia, as far as I can tell, completely ignores the skills _enabling_ excellent research. Earlier in the thread, someone mentioned this nice saying, which sums it up pretty neatly: > The astronomers thought I wasn't that great an astronomer but a great programmer, and the programmers thought I wasn't a great programmer but a great astronomer. One last thing I want to point out: > It's the same in CS. This kind of work should be handed over to someone who can work on it full time, so researchers can get on with research full time. Yes, I will definitely hire full time positions for this. The biggest groups are doing this already, probably because they realise that having a software engineer on board can help. I will apply the same considerations when hiring for such a role, trading 'depth' in favour of 'breadth' when it comes to their skill set, though. That strikes me as the right way of approaching this.
bigodanktime 5y ago
Professors are rewarded for publications and almost nothing else (at least from what I've seen at the school I'm apart of), so because of it all effort goes towards publications, and this passes down to students and the folks they hope to hire. Its also unfortunate any work that is not done towards a publication is essentially invisible to everyone within that system. Even things like teaching are considered second class to publications (very unfortunate consequence). That being said this is from my experience and am unsure how it is at other schools.
- kurthr 5y ago
  Well, early in their carriers they are rewarded for grants and supporting many grad students. It's problematic to not award tenure to a professor who is supporting 30 students. If they leave with their grants and only take a few (of the best) students, leaving the rest of the students in the lurch and very (rightfully?!) angry at the department dean/provost. Usually, some other means of supporting them is found since it's a little embarrassing otherwise. After tenure, it seems like profs drop down to a manageable 4-7 students in the disciplines I studied in. You can do that on 1-2 grants a year. As others have previously mentioned it's a bit weird, because actually teaching is neither taught nor really supported by most research universities. It's often required, but not all that advantageous to do well.
  - bigodanktime 5y ago
    Its unfortunate with teaching as I see it as an opportunity to extend the good values of research and problem solving to students (at least in the later years of a degree). I guess it depends on how you view an academic institution, is it to produce good thinkers or produce good work, although similar seems like you approach it in different ways when approaching it from one way or the other. I'm not even upset with professors, I think Assistant Profs do the most work I've ever seen anyone ever do, its absolutely insane the crazy workload they take on to get tenure.
- robwwilliams 5y ago
  I think this demand for focus is more pervasive at top tier institutions. I intentionally chose a second tier research institution with great colleagues in my area, then neuroscience, so that I could indulge my whims and T-type style of science. I “wasted” two years playing with databases for genetics and then published the first paper in biomedical science with a URL in 1994 (Portable Dictionary of the Mouse Genome). That service is still running as wwww.genenetwork.org and has been a terrific catalyst for much high impact work. The advantage now of T type approaches is that, as the source points out so clearly, it gives you flexibility to grow, shift fields, and collaborate efficiently.
throwawaygh 5y ago
>Setting up a suitable build system. Writing some unit tests for the code. Creating a skeleton of the models that are to be developed. Designing nice mock-ups or logos. Creating animations or graphics for presentations. I actively advise students against joining labs like this and consider the whole enterprise unethical. I raise concerns whenever I'm reviewing grant proposals by folks who run their labs like this. I've successful nuked funding proposals because the work plan included language like this. Want a devops engineer? Hire a devops engineer ("systems scientist" or so on). Want a graphic designer? Hire a graphic designer. But DO NOT lie to impressionable youth by telling them that you are admitting them into a PhD program to be your apprentice on a research project and then proceed to pay them $30K/yr (with marginal benefits) for uninteresting and unexceptional engineering and design work. They are taking a huge financial opportunity cost to work on uniquely high leverage problems. Maintaining your research group's build system is not what they signed up for. > ‘I’m a researcher, not a(n) X,’ with X∈ {software developer, designer, marketing person, artist, …} Sure, but here's the rub. What does everything in that set have in common? They make at least 2x+ the average PhD student and have much better benefits. If you want a "force multiplier" person in your lab, do your job: get a grant and pay a fair price for that sort of labor. PhD students are NOT ∈ {software developer, designer, marketing person, artist, …}. If they were, you'd be paying quite a bit more and/or getting far less exceptional candidates.
- mehrdada 5y ago
  > They are taking a huge financial opportunity cost to work on uniquely high leverage problems. Maintaining your research group's build system is not what they signed up for. Not necessarily an opportunity cost. Often they are paid in a more valuable commodity, i.e. visas.
  - throwawaygh 5y ago
    Probably true. But I'm writing from the perspective a grant reviewer. Systematically abusing immigrant labor.... well, it isn't exactly a more charitable interpretation. So, from my perspective, a bit of a moot point :)
  - 5y ago
mehrdada 5y ago
Core problem is you generally will fail a PhD if all you are is the middle author of lots of papers. Even worse if you are looking for an academic job afterwards.
- mehrdada 5y ago
  P.S. and it is optimistic to assume the person’s contributions are highlighted in authorship and not buried in the acknowledgment section.
- Topolomancer 5y ago
  Author here---that's exactly one of the issues I encountered. I am making a conscious effort to move beyond this state of affairs, but it takes more than one person to enact change.
brian-armstrong 5y ago
Perhaps a shift in perspective is required. Academia is saving T-shaped people from a life frittered away on empty papers. This is a good thing since it allows them to participate in the market instead where their skills can be put to use.
cammikebrown 5y ago
In academia you are rewarded for focusing on one extremely narrow topic (your thesis). The "top" of academia is overly composed of I-shaped rather than T-shaped people, who don't do as well in getting there.
zomglings 5y ago
This article points out yet ANOTHER way in which modern academia is rendering itself obsolete. Let academia die the miserable death it deserves. Let us instead focus our efforts on building its replacements rather than participate in this research funding gangbang of society. Because, make no mistake, we are all paying for this garbage. For replacements: 1. We need systems meant to EDUCATE goddamnit. (e.g. Khan Academy) 2. We need systems focused entirely on producing PUBLIC and cutting edge research where resources are assigned on merit. (Don't yet know what these research systems look like.)
- nexuist 5y ago
  > where resources are assigned on merit No Child Left Behind was supposed to implement this; the problem that quickly became obvious is that schools that were already doing well got more money because their students had higher scores and schools that were struggling actually lost funding because their scores were garbage. This contributed to the gap widening instead of closing. It's difficult to figure out how to develop a system where resources are allocated based on objective potential rather than historical metrics.
  - zomglings 5y ago
    I did not know that about No Child Left Behind. If you have some links, would really appreciate them. I will look myself, as well. Sounds like a great bit of history to learn from. I do believe that academics have come up with the right approach to determine the value of research - anonymized peer review. The problem is, there are always signals that leak through that veil of anonymity that help you determine who the authors and even the reviewers actually are.
    - nexuist 5y ago
      https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/library/blog/873 https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/library/blog/873 > Perhaps the most adverse unintended consequence of NCLB is that it creates incentives for schools to rid themselves of students who are not doing well, producing higher scores at the expense of vulnerable students' education. Studies have found that sanctioning schools based on average student scores leads schools to retain students in grade so that grade-level scores will look better (although these students ultimately do less well and drop out at higher rates), exclude low-scoring students from admissions and encourage such students to transfer or drop out. https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/10/27/443110755/no-child-left-behind-what-worked-what-didnt https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/10/27/443110755/no-chil... > Ahn found a very different story among schools where lots of students were struggling. For these, often poorer schools, the law was like quicksand. Donna Brown is director of federal program monitoring and support for North Carolina's public schools, and she saw the quicksand firsthand. > "When I came to the department in 2004," Brown remembers, "there were nine schools in the state that were identified for some level of improvement sanction. And, by 2008-9, there were 521."
throwawayarnty 5y ago
His example of a T-shaped person doing T-shaped work is: >Setting up a suitable build system. Writing some unit tests for the code. Creating a skeleton of the models that are to be developed. Designing nice mock-ups or logos. Creating animations or graphics for presentations. This makes me think the author is a fairly I-shaped person, because those examples look like one area (i.e., build systems, unit tests, sketching models). An example of a T-shaped person would be someone who can develop wet-lab experimental technique as well as new machine learning models (which in academia you have the space to do).
- Topolomancer 5y ago
  Author here---I was thinking about actual design work or working on the 'presentation' aspects of a publication. For me, the development of new experimental techniques and new ML models is more or less the same. Could you elaborate? (but you are spot on: the breadth of my skills depends on your Zoom level...I am only a lowercase t at best :D)
  - throwawayarnty 5y ago
    Nice to hear from you! I guess for me it is assumed that one who does the work can also communicate the work in various forms (text, formal presentations, informal discussions). Perhaps it requires separate skills? But to me they sound like a continuation along the same "I". When one hears a nice talk from (what I would call) an "I" researcher, it is usually communicated well, but the techniques and scientific question can be narrow. When I hear a nice talk from a "T" researcher, it's usually someone who combines seemingly disparate fields (e.g. physics + sociology) together to solve a scientific question. I guess either way I assume "I" and "T" researchers are both able to communicate their work. Perhaps that's where I misunderstood your post. Doing wet-lab experiments and developing in-silico ML models are completely different and often times labs are often focused on only one or the other. I imagine a T-shaped person excels in wet-lab experiments to generate quality data as well as in analysis/modeling skills to put the data into a quantitative framework. I also want to make it clear that I don't consider "I" or "T" any better than the others. We need both in science to progress. Perhaps our definitions of "I" and "T" differ slightly.
throwaway1183 5y ago
There are people for whom PhD is worth. If you are those people don't read this. It's easily knowable if you are or not. Now for people like me: Give me at least a million USD to invest in next PhD in CS. The most BS form of PhD is PhD in CS. It chirps your life away, with no clear benefits. It doesn't scale well enough in a field where innovation is rapidly progressing. Also when you are being underpaid while working for someone else's vision. You can't do what you want, because "supervisor" may not like it. And once you come out of your PhD, who is going to hire you? Industry or academia? Well even in academia, there are tons of PhD already, so goodluck competing that. And in industry goodluck finding that sweet industry that requires research. I was always sold by the dream that PhD gives time and opportunity to involve in high leverage problems. Turns out it is a just another churn. What value does this paper bring? Nothing. When most of valuable work is being done in industry and groups collaborating across nations. And to be in such group, you have to have background. (People whom I mentioned earlier) Instead of wasting 5 yrs on CS Phd, invest on one single company. That will bring value x10 than stupid PhD.
- rscho 5y ago
  What you describe is not particular to CS. It's the same in every field. However, most people don't view PhDs as a money-making endeavor. IMO, that's a good thing. And no, most of the important work does not happen exclusively in the industry. Academia is very valuable, just not for the same kind of stuff.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  > And once you come out of your PhD, who is going to hire you? Industry or academia? Well even in academia, there are tons of PhD already, so goodluck competing that. Since you seem to be talking about a CS Ph.D. in particular, there are actually many open faculty positions because industry is able to absorb so many graduates. It's quite common for a CS Ph.D. to get an academic tenure-track position right after graduation, without having to do a post-doc. We are interviewing many such candidates right now at my department, and we have been running searches since before my time. I was hired this way actually. It's competitive, sure, but you won't be sitting around for 5 years like my friend in Biology. Actually the most searches fail because it's really a buyer's market for applicants. They can negotiate huge startup packages by leveraging competing offers that our department can't even hope to match, and so the search continues...
rambambram 5y ago
On one hand all these PhD thingies are very very important, and on the other hand words like "assets" and "commodities" are used for these same PhD people.
- Topolomancer 5y ago
  Author here---I mean the term 'asset' in a positive way, but I am also not a native English speaker, so maybe something gets lost in translation. Sorry about that!
- throwawayarnty 5y ago
  My favorite term they use in academia is "trainee" to justify low salaries. Trainees encompass High School Students, Undergraduates, to Postdocs, an age range from maybe 18 to 38.
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    To be clear, students are paid stipends, not salaries. Stipends are low because they are stipends.
    - Topolomancer 5y ago
      Depends on the system. In EU, these are often salaried positions as well.
  - Topolomancer 5y ago
    Author here. Yeah, I am also still a trainee or an 'early career research' or a 'junior researcher.' These terms are...weird.
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
I remember Clifford Stoll in The Cuckoo's Egg had an observation that went something like this: The astronomer's thought I wasn't that great an astronomer but a great programmer, and the programmers thought I wasn't a great programmer but a great astronomer. So maybe Stoll appeared as a T-shaped person to others but a line to himself?
periheli0n 5y ago
It will be near impossible to get tenure if one develops T-shaped qualities. You simply cannot amass the number of grants and papers necessary when dancing on several academic parties, or even doing devops. I've seen too many PhD students doing that and then hitting an academic dead end in their first postdoc or directly after graduating. It's great for the PI if they have T-shaped students on their team, but they must make it clear to those highly talented people that academia is most likely not for them. Which puts in question whether it makes sense for them to do a PhD at all. The problem is, the PI has hardly an incentive to tell these valuable, lowly-paid and highly motivated people that they made a bad career choice by starting a PhD.
- tgv 5y ago
  > It will be near impossible to get tenure if one develops T-shaped qualities. That's completely true in my experience, and not only because of the "lack of depth". Interdisciplinary work is simply not rewarded, because your papers are only partially recognized in the department you apply to. I worked in a cog.sci/comp.sci mixture with the focus on language (which adds linguistics), but the psychology departments didn't accept CS conference publications. That my principal paper got a pretty decent citation score for that field, and that some of the follow-up papers including experiments didn't do bad either, didn't mean anything to the CS department: they simply don't care about the topic, and nor "Cognition," nor "Cerebral Cortex" featured on their impact lists. That said, I think the article's examples (setting up a build system, designing nice mock-ups or logos, creating animations or graphics for presentations) are not T-shaped academic skills, at all. Creating presentations is something everyone has to learn, the rest is offloading support work on PhDs. I've got an idea: perhaps they can do the teaching as well. That's a good T-skill. And do lab support. And get coffee, because you know, so much breadth. No, that's pure exploitation of, exactly as you call it: > valuable, lowly-paid and highly motivated people that they made a bad career choice by starting a PhD. PhD programs should only be allowed when there's a guarantee of a worthy curriculum, and sufficient supervision, and support. There'll be less PhDs, but that might even be beneficial.
  - Topolomancer 5y ago
jarenmf 5y ago
I'm familiar with the type of people you're describing, they are curios and creative and constantly looking for ways to improve things, these people are very rare (particularly in academia?) and really not easy to find. I don't think these criteria you mentioned will help since most of them are not necessary personal qualities, they are rather a group culture. If there are established good practices in the group (at minimum using version control, doing regular backups) new people will follow. I agree with you about the absurdity of the number of publications factor giving that the asymmetry between the values of publications.
- Topolomancer 5y ago
  That's a good point---if they are not easy to find, maybe it is possible to instil some values into a group's culture to _create them_?
williamstein 5y ago
The original post says the following, with italics and explanation points: "Coming from mathematics, where one paper every few years (!) is considered the mark of a productive mathematician,". I spent decades in academic pure mathematics, and I've been on many hiring committees, and that assertion doesn't match my experience. Also, look at the original poster's own publication list at https://bastian.rieck.me/research/#publications https://bastian.rieck.me/research/#publications, which has several publications every year.
- Topolomancer 5y ago
  Author here---I am not exactly doing mathematics research any more, but have shifted to CS/ML. It was my impression that the pace in that field is a little faster than in pure mathematics (whether that's a good thing or not is debatable). Please let me know whether I misunderstood this.
  - williamstein 5y ago
    There is some discussion with vague data here [1]; their estimate of "1-2 papers/year is pretty typical" sounds about right to me. That's significantly more than "one every several years", but perhaps a lot less than might be common in your area. On the other hand, if you were to normalize paper count by number of authors, then maybe my observation does agree with yours. [1] https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/122426/how-many-papers-does-a-mathematician-publish-on-average-in-a-year/122437 https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/122426/how-many...
    - Topolomancer 5y ago
      Thanks, that's interesting! I had the impression that it was lower, but I must admit I lack experience in the publishing practices of pure mathematics.
debi3523 5y ago

Interesting. If academia prioritizes “I shaped” is it fair to say that industry prioritizes “T shapers”? That’s certainly been my experience. Although industry does want deep expertise in one area. I’ve heard a lot of companies explicitly recruit T-shaped individuals. But I’ve never heard the opposite.

atemerev 5y ago

T-shaped is so 2002. Today, we need Ш-shaped people!

mrVentures 5y ago

What's the point in even dividing people between such silly categories? I understand the context within a metaphor but when the author starts saying things like, 'every successful team I have been on had a t-shaped person' , it just seems absurdly reductive.

tomrod 5y ago
T-types are defined as those that increase a team's agility. Saying the definition each time would be cumbersome,so we package the connotation up into an idiom and move on. Generalizations can make for identification of useful patterns. Sometimes, the identification is pareidolia. Sometimes, it works. Tools of science and philosophy help us move that along. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia
- airstrike 5y ago
  > T-types are defined as those that increase a team's agility. …according to some model of the work which may be entirely inaccurate, I think is the point the parent is making.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  > T-types are defined as those that increase a team's agility. That's not how they are defined in the article or the detailed definition it links to. The definitions there define traits of someone who may be able to increase the agility of a team depending on the team and what it is doing but the same could be said for most types of people yet not all are T-shaped and vice versa.
ironmagma 5y ago
Everyone is T-shaped, so this verbiage is baffling. There’s not a single person alive who only knows about, say, dogs and nothing else.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  Yeah. T-shaped is part of the corporate BS lingo. It is meaningless and it has a shallow appeal of something more profound than it ostensibly is. If you really think about it, everyone is T shaped or more like a root of a tree with depth in various aspects of their career. It is also time dependent. In 2011, I knew a lot about computation fluid dynamics. Today, not so much. The whole thing is a fad. Unrelated but there are a lot of things like this in the startup world as well. For example, Elon keeps saying all you need to do is find out what arrangement atoms need to be in and then figure out how to do it. Yeah, no shit. Drug discovery is just sticking the right atoms together? Or software engineering is just pressing the right keys on the keyboard and Michael Phelps is just modulating the right muscles at the right time? It sounds more profound than it really is. It is also completely unactionable and impractical.
  - oriolid 5y ago
    The part about Elon Musk could just mean that he is not as T-shaped as he thinks he is.
- Topolomancer 5y ago
  Author here---fully agree with you and alluded to that in the footnotes. Of course, a single letter is insufficient to capture human variation. The 'T' is taken to mean researchers that are not only willing to become an expert in a single topic of their choice, but that are capable of collaborating across disciplines, or investing additional resources in the things that are not commonly 'rewarded' in academia but still necessary (foundational work behind the scenes, or the community-building that another comment mentioned).
drawkbox 5y ago
From the footnotes: > There is a veritable zoo of characters of the alphabet, trying to capture the elusive properties of people out there in the real world. It should be understood that I do not even for a second think that one pithy letter is sufficient to describe a real person; all of these characterisations are merely hinting towards certain properties. As always in real life, there are many different shades on a spectrum to consider here T-shaped is somewhat generalized because over time people like this become more. Overall they are great for the start of projects and long term because they do what is necessary to ship products and projects. > Over time, one might think that a T-shaped person thus turns into a comb-like pattern. As far as I understand, this has not been studied yet by ethnographers. Maybe the term ‘serial experts’ would also been appropriate, except for its unfortunate similarity to the criminal world. The author states T-shaped people become the glue or "scaffolding" for a successful project. > Ts as multipliers. Throughout my career, the most impactful projects always had a T-shaped person onboard. This person would usually not be an expert in the subject matter, but would be able to provide the direly-needed scaffolding and foundation of a project that is all too often ignored in the initial phase, until it comes back later on with full swing to wreak havoc In my experience, T-shaped people can and do become experts of product, these are people more willing to make things work and ship projects over just focusing on their own goals or field of study solely. T-shaped people become product experts as they have seen more areas or earlier parts of the whole. T-shaped people can take a project from start to finish due to them being product/market experts from their involvement in more than just one area. Startups seem to operate and start best with T-shaped. In game development, good game projects and interactive projects especially Ts are prevalent. In game development for instance, Valve prefers T-shaped employees, generalists in many areas but deeper knowledge in one more more areas, people willing to help ship.[1] Even if later you have to get more depth in certain areas like rendering, networking, animation, audio or even branding/marketing, Ts are the trails that form that can later be upgraded or refined if needed. Ts are the root of self-organizing teams and companies like Valve. Valve has a good take on the balance for T-shaped people that help ship games [1]. These types area willing to wear different hats even if it isn't in the area they want to be their main focus. The mere understanding of those areas from experience in them, can make their main focus more finely tuned to work and mesh with the product. > 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 discipline—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 without 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 Too much specialization can be bad for projects and people, especially early on. Though by definition Ts would have a one or more deeper knowledge skillsets and can bounce between I-shaped and T-shaped without issue. For startups, games, apps, content, even entrepreneurship or sole-proprietors to small companies, T-shaped is the way it has to be in most cases. Everyone is somewhat T-shaped, it is a sliding scale. For academics at the Masters/Phd level, being T-shaped may actually be harmful or even hidden on applications because the nature of academics is the deeper I-shaped focus, you are trying to further the deeper detail of some subject. I bet lots of more broad generalists leave this off their descriptions/applications because of the bias against it. Everyone is T-shaped, just some are more willing to do different roles and wear different hats. It is a balance of being a leader in their chosen subject, but also wanting to get their foot in the door. A T-shaped person can be an expert still, and in many areas, but stating too much generalization may lead to bias in academia as this article summarizes. [1] Valve Employee Handbook (page 46) https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployeeHandbook.pdf https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployee...
Topolomancer 5y ago
Author here---I agree with the silliness of these categories, but I found no better way of phrasing this in an abstract manner. In the teams I mentioned in the article, it was super helpful to have that one colleague who knew a bit about software development, about running code in an HPC environment, about automated testing etc. Yes, these skills might be commonplace somewhere else, but in academia, they are typically not. Moreover, there are no incentives around for people to improve their knowledge in these tangential or broader areas. They might even be 'punished' for it later on since their research output ostensibly suffers.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  That person is usually called a "developer." Historically, it's a technician's job. Of course it's super useful to have someone on an experimental physics team who can personally machine metal, blow glass, and repair broken electronics, but generally you try to leave that to specialists. The people who built CERN are not the same as the people who designed CERN are not the same as the people who did the research that made something like CERN plausible. Your attitude seems to be "Well - ML, web design, graphics, original research, it's all computers so why not?" There's a reason Peter Higgs didn't operate a concrete mixer, and that's because it wasn't his job. It's the same in CS. This kind of work should be handed over to someone who can work on it full time, so researchers can get on with research full time.
  - Topolomancer 5y ago
    > Your attitude seems to be "Well - ML, web design, graphics, original research, it's all computers so why not?" > > There's a reason Peter Higgs didn't operate a concrete mixer, and that's because it wasn't his job. That's not what I meant at all, though. I realise that my perspective might be specific to machine learning research: here, most papers involve implementations, prototypes, etc. My point could be boiled down to the following: if you have a candidate with fewer papers but _also_ some knowledge on how to, for instance, write clean code (or at least clean_er_ code), that candidate can be an asset _just as much_ as the candidate going into a Ph.D. with 10 first-author papers already. Both candidates cover different aspects of the research area. I am saying that it's a good idea to look beyond `$num_papers` as a metric when hiring budding Ph.D. students, being well aware of their respective responsibilities. Current hiring practice in academia, as far as I can tell, completely ignores the skills _enabling_ excellent research. Earlier in the thread, someone mentioned this nice saying, which sums it up pretty neatly: > The astronomers thought I wasn't that great an astronomer but a great programmer, and the programmers thought I wasn't a great programmer but a great astronomer. One last thing I want to point out: > It's the same in CS. This kind of work should be handed over to someone who can work on it full time, so researchers can get on with research full time. Yes, I will definitely hire full time positions for this. The biggest groups are doing this already, probably because they realise that having a software engineer on board can help. I will apply the same considerations when hiring for such a role, trading 'depth' in favour of 'breadth' when it comes to their skill set, though. That strikes me as the right way of approaching this.

bigodanktime 5y ago

Professors are rewarded for publications and almost nothing else (at least from what I've seen at the school I'm apart of), so because of it all effort goes towards publications, and this passes down to students and the folks they hope to hire. Its also unfortunate any work that is not done towards a publication is essentially invisible to everyone within that system. Even things like teaching are considered second class to publications (very unfortunate consequence). That being said this is from my experience and am unsure how it is at other schools.

kurthr 5y ago
Well, early in their carriers they are rewarded for grants and supporting many grad students. It's problematic to not award tenure to a professor who is supporting 30 students. If they leave with their grants and only take a few (of the best) students, leaving the rest of the students in the lurch and very (rightfully?!) angry at the department dean/provost. Usually, some other means of supporting them is found since it's a little embarrassing otherwise. After tenure, it seems like profs drop down to a manageable 4-7 students in the disciplines I studied in. You can do that on 1-2 grants a year. As others have previously mentioned it's a bit weird, because actually teaching is neither taught nor really supported by most research universities. It's often required, but not all that advantageous to do well.
- bigodanktime 5y ago
  Its unfortunate with teaching as I see it as an opportunity to extend the good values of research and problem solving to students (at least in the later years of a degree). I guess it depends on how you view an academic institution, is it to produce good thinkers or produce good work, although similar seems like you approach it in different ways when approaching it from one way or the other. I'm not even upset with professors, I think Assistant Profs do the most work I've ever seen anyone ever do, its absolutely insane the crazy workload they take on to get tenure.
robwwilliams 5y ago
I think this demand for focus is more pervasive at top tier institutions. I intentionally chose a second tier research institution with great colleagues in my area, then neuroscience, so that I could indulge my whims and T-type style of science. I “wasted” two years playing with databases for genetics and then published the first paper in biomedical science with a URL in 1994 (Portable Dictionary of the Mouse Genome). That service is still running as wwww.genenetwork.org and has been a terrific catalyst for much high impact work. The advantage now of T type approaches is that, as the source points out so clearly, it gives you flexibility to grow, shift fields, and collaborate efficiently.

throwawaygh 5y ago

>Setting up a suitable build system. Writing some unit tests for the code. Creating a skeleton of the models that are to be developed. Designing nice mock-ups or logos. Creating animations or graphics for presentations. I actively advise students against joining labs like this and consider the whole enterprise unethical. I raise concerns whenever I'm reviewing grant proposals by folks who run their labs like this. I've successful nuked funding proposals because the work plan included language like this. Want a devops engineer? Hire a devops engineer ("systems scientist" or so on). Want a graphic designer? Hire a graphic designer. But DO NOT lie to impressionable youth by telling them that you are admitting them into a PhD program to be your apprentice on a research project and then proceed to pay them $30K/yr (with marginal benefits) for uninteresting and unexceptional engineering and design work. They are taking a huge financial opportunity cost to work on uniquely high leverage problems. Maintaining your research group's build system is not what they signed up for. > ‘I’m a researcher, not a(n) X,’ with X∈ {software developer, designer, marketing person, artist, …} Sure, but here's the rub. What does everything in that set have in common? They make at least 2x+ the average PhD student and have much better benefits. If you want a "force multiplier" person in your lab, do your job: get a grant and pay a fair price for that sort of labor. PhD students are NOT ∈ {software developer, designer, marketing person, artist, …}. If they were, you'd be paying quite a bit more and/or getting far less exceptional candidates.

mehrdada 5y ago
> They are taking a huge financial opportunity cost to work on uniquely high leverage problems. Maintaining your research group's build system is not what they signed up for. Not necessarily an opportunity cost. Often they are paid in a more valuable commodity, i.e. visas.
- throwawaygh 5y ago
  Probably true. But I'm writing from the perspective a grant reviewer. Systematically abusing immigrant labor.... well, it isn't exactly a more charitable interpretation. So, from my perspective, a bit of a moot point :)
- 5y ago

mehrdada 5y ago

Core problem is you generally will fail a PhD if all you are is the middle author of lots of papers. Even worse if you are looking for an academic job afterwards.

mehrdada 5y ago
P.S. and it is optimistic to assume the person’s contributions are highlighted in authorship and not buried in the acknowledgment section.
Topolomancer 5y ago
Author here---that's exactly one of the issues I encountered. I am making a conscious effort to move beyond this state of affairs, but it takes more than one person to enact change.

brian-armstrong 5y ago

Perhaps a shift in perspective is required. Academia is saving T-shaped people from a life frittered away on empty papers. This is a good thing since it allows them to participate in the market instead where their skills can be put to use.

cammikebrown 5y ago

In academia you are rewarded for focusing on one extremely narrow topic (your thesis). The "top" of academia is overly composed of I-shaped rather than T-shaped people, who don't do as well in getting there.

zomglings 5y ago

This article points out yet ANOTHER way in which modern academia is rendering itself obsolete. Let academia die the miserable death it deserves. Let us instead focus our efforts on building its replacements rather than participate in this research funding gangbang of society. Because, make no mistake, we are all paying for this garbage. For replacements: 1. We need systems meant to EDUCATE goddamnit. (e.g. Khan Academy) 2. We need systems focused entirely on producing PUBLIC and cutting edge research where resources are assigned on merit. (Don't yet know what these research systems look like.)

nexuist 5y ago
> where resources are assigned on merit No Child Left Behind was supposed to implement this; the problem that quickly became obvious is that schools that were already doing well got more money because their students had higher scores and schools that were struggling actually lost funding because their scores were garbage. This contributed to the gap widening instead of closing. It's difficult to figure out how to develop a system where resources are allocated based on objective potential rather than historical metrics.
- zomglings 5y ago
  I did not know that about No Child Left Behind. If you have some links, would really appreciate them. I will look myself, as well. Sounds like a great bit of history to learn from. I do believe that academics have come up with the right approach to determine the value of research - anonymized peer review. The problem is, there are always signals that leak through that veil of anonymity that help you determine who the authors and even the reviewers actually are.
  - nexuist 5y ago
    https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/library/blog/873 https://edpolicy.stanford.edu/library/blog/873 > Perhaps the most adverse unintended consequence of NCLB is that it creates incentives for schools to rid themselves of students who are not doing well, producing higher scores at the expense of vulnerable students' education. Studies have found that sanctioning schools based on average student scores leads schools to retain students in grade so that grade-level scores will look better (although these students ultimately do less well and drop out at higher rates), exclude low-scoring students from admissions and encourage such students to transfer or drop out. https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/10/27/443110755/no-child-left-behind-what-worked-what-didnt https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/10/27/443110755/no-chil... > Ahn found a very different story among schools where lots of students were struggling. For these, often poorer schools, the law was like quicksand. Donna Brown is director of federal program monitoring and support for North Carolina's public schools, and she saw the quicksand firsthand. > "When I came to the department in 2004," Brown remembers, "there were nine schools in the state that were identified for some level of improvement sanction. And, by 2008-9, there were 521."

throwawayarnty 5y ago

His example of a T-shaped person doing T-shaped work is: >Setting up a suitable build system. Writing some unit tests for the code. Creating a skeleton of the models that are to be developed. Designing nice mock-ups or logos. Creating animations or graphics for presentations. This makes me think the author is a fairly I-shaped person, because those examples look like one area (i.e., build systems, unit tests, sketching models). An example of a T-shaped person would be someone who can develop wet-lab experimental technique as well as new machine learning models (which in academia you have the space to do).

Topolomancer 5y ago
Author here---I was thinking about actual design work or working on the 'presentation' aspects of a publication. For me, the development of new experimental techniques and new ML models is more or less the same. Could you elaborate? (but you are spot on: the breadth of my skills depends on your Zoom level...I am only a lowercase t at best :D)
- throwawayarnty 5y ago
  Nice to hear from you! I guess for me it is assumed that one who does the work can also communicate the work in various forms (text, formal presentations, informal discussions). Perhaps it requires separate skills? But to me they sound like a continuation along the same "I". When one hears a nice talk from (what I would call) an "I" researcher, it is usually communicated well, but the techniques and scientific question can be narrow. When I hear a nice talk from a "T" researcher, it's usually someone who combines seemingly disparate fields (e.g. physics + sociology) together to solve a scientific question. I guess either way I assume "I" and "T" researchers are both able to communicate their work. Perhaps that's where I misunderstood your post. Doing wet-lab experiments and developing in-silico ML models are completely different and often times labs are often focused on only one or the other. I imagine a T-shaped person excels in wet-lab experiments to generate quality data as well as in analysis/modeling skills to put the data into a quantitative framework. I also want to make it clear that I don't consider "I" or "T" any better than the others. We need both in science to progress. Perhaps our definitions of "I" and "T" differ slightly.

throwaway1183 5y ago

There are people for whom PhD is worth. If you are those people don't read this. It's easily knowable if you are or not. Now for people like me: Give me at least a million USD to invest in next PhD in CS. The most BS form of PhD is PhD in CS. It chirps your life away, with no clear benefits. It doesn't scale well enough in a field where innovation is rapidly progressing. Also when you are being underpaid while working for someone else's vision. You can't do what you want, because "supervisor" may not like it. And once you come out of your PhD, who is going to hire you? Industry or academia? Well even in academia, there are tons of PhD already, so goodluck competing that. And in industry goodluck finding that sweet industry that requires research. I was always sold by the dream that PhD gives time and opportunity to involve in high leverage problems. Turns out it is a just another churn. What value does this paper bring? Nothing. When most of valuable work is being done in industry and groups collaborating across nations. And to be in such group, you have to have background. (People whom I mentioned earlier) Instead of wasting 5 yrs on CS Phd, invest on one single company. That will bring value x10 than stupid PhD.

rscho 5y ago
What you describe is not particular to CS. It's the same in every field. However, most people don't view PhDs as a money-making endeavor. IMO, that's a good thing. And no, most of the important work does not happen exclusively in the industry. Academia is very valuable, just not for the same kind of stuff.
ModernMech 5y ago
> And once you come out of your PhD, who is going to hire you? Industry or academia? Well even in academia, there are tons of PhD already, so goodluck competing that. Since you seem to be talking about a CS Ph.D. in particular, there are actually many open faculty positions because industry is able to absorb so many graduates. It's quite common for a CS Ph.D. to get an academic tenure-track position right after graduation, without having to do a post-doc. We are interviewing many such candidates right now at my department, and we have been running searches since before my time. I was hired this way actually. It's competitive, sure, but you won't be sitting around for 5 years like my friend in Biology. Actually the most searches fail because it's really a buyer's market for applicants. They can negotiate huge startup packages by leveraging competing offers that our department can't even hope to match, and so the search continues...

rambambram 5y ago

On one hand all these PhD thingies are very very important, and on the other hand words like "assets" and "commodities" are used for these same PhD people.

Topolomancer 5y ago
Author here---I mean the term 'asset' in a positive way, but I am also not a native English speaker, so maybe something gets lost in translation. Sorry about that!
throwawayarnty 5y ago
My favorite term they use in academia is "trainee" to justify low salaries. Trainees encompass High School Students, Undergraduates, to Postdocs, an age range from maybe 18 to 38.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  To be clear, students are paid stipends, not salaries. Stipends are low because they are stipends.
  - Topolomancer 5y ago
    Depends on the system. In EU, these are often salaried positions as well.
- Topolomancer 5y ago
  Author here. Yeah, I am also still a trainee or an 'early career research' or a 'junior researcher.' These terms are...weird.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

I remember Clifford Stoll in The Cuckoo's Egg had an observation that went something like this: The astronomer's thought I wasn't that great an astronomer but a great programmer, and the programmers thought I wasn't a great programmer but a great astronomer. So maybe Stoll appeared as a T-shaped person to others but a line to himself?

periheli0n 5y ago

It will be near impossible to get tenure if one develops T-shaped qualities. You simply cannot amass the number of grants and papers necessary when dancing on several academic parties, or even doing devops. I've seen too many PhD students doing that and then hitting an academic dead end in their first postdoc or directly after graduating. It's great for the PI if they have T-shaped students on their team, but they must make it clear to those highly talented people that academia is most likely not for them. Which puts in question whether it makes sense for them to do a PhD at all. The problem is, the PI has hardly an incentive to tell these valuable, lowly-paid and highly motivated people that they made a bad career choice by starting a PhD.

tgv 5y ago
> It will be near impossible to get tenure if one develops T-shaped qualities. That's completely true in my experience, and not only because of the "lack of depth". Interdisciplinary work is simply not rewarded, because your papers are only partially recognized in the department you apply to. I worked in a cog.sci/comp.sci mixture with the focus on language (which adds linguistics), but the psychology departments didn't accept CS conference publications. That my principal paper got a pretty decent citation score for that field, and that some of the follow-up papers including experiments didn't do bad either, didn't mean anything to the CS department: they simply don't care about the topic, and nor "Cognition," nor "Cerebral Cortex" featured on their impact lists. That said, I think the article's examples (setting up a build system, designing nice mock-ups or logos, creating animations or graphics for presentations) are not T-shaped academic skills, at all. Creating presentations is something everyone has to learn, the rest is offloading support work on PhDs. I've got an idea: perhaps they can do the teaching as well. That's a good T-skill. And do lab support. And get coffee, because you know, so much breadth. No, that's pure exploitation of, exactly as you call it: > valuable, lowly-paid and highly motivated people that they made a bad career choice by starting a PhD. PhD programs should only be allowed when there's a guarantee of a worthy curriculum, and sufficient supervision, and support. There'll be less PhDs, but that might even be beneficial.
- Topolomancer 5y ago

jarenmf 5y ago

I'm familiar with the type of people you're describing, they are curios and creative and constantly looking for ways to improve things, these people are very rare (particularly in academia?) and really not easy to find. I don't think these criteria you mentioned will help since most of them are not necessary personal qualities, they are rather a group culture. If there are established good practices in the group (at minimum using version control, doing regular backups) new people will follow. I agree with you about the absurdity of the number of publications factor giving that the asymmetry between the values of publications.

Topolomancer 5y ago
That's a good point---if they are not easy to find, maybe it is possible to instil some values into a group's culture to _create them_?

williamstein 5y ago

The original post says the following, with italics and explanation points: "Coming from mathematics, where one paper every few years (!) is considered the mark of a productive mathematician,". I spent decades in academic pure mathematics, and I've been on many hiring committees, and that assertion doesn't match my experience. Also, look at the original poster's own publication list at https://bastian.rieck.me/research/#publications https://bastian.rieck.me/research/#publications, which has several publications every year.

Topolomancer 5y ago
Author here---I am not exactly doing mathematics research any more, but have shifted to CS/ML. It was my impression that the pace in that field is a little faster than in pure mathematics (whether that's a good thing or not is debatable). Please let me know whether I misunderstood this.
- williamstein 5y ago
  There is some discussion with vague data here [1]; their estimate of "1-2 papers/year is pretty typical" sounds about right to me. That's significantly more than "one every several years", but perhaps a lot less than might be common in your area. On the other hand, if you were to normalize paper count by number of authors, then maybe my observation does agree with yours. [1] https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/122426/how-many-papers-does-a-mathematician-publish-on-average-in-a-year/122437 https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/122426/how-many...
  - Topolomancer 5y ago
    Thanks, that's interesting! I had the impression that it was lower, but I must admit I lack experience in the publishing practices of pure mathematics.

debi3523 5y ago