12 ms·
Why T-shaped people? (2018)
- frozenport 4y agoEverybody agrees high quality talent is great. Sick of articles lauding the obvious.
- kkfx 4y agoA thing have changed starting from few years ago: while before people prize specialization as the best route for anyone now some start prizing generic vast knowledge. This shift is so far limited but important, it means some have realized too many have lost the big picture and we need it to keep anything working well...
- jon-wood 4y agoAny reasonably large organisation probably needs both types of person. There’ll be the deep problems that require a true specialist to deal with (Netflix blogs about optimising network transfer spring to mind here), and people with broad experience who can bring that to bear on new problems, put together prototypes, and understand which specialisms to involve as it develops. There’s huge value in understanding the entire stack in the early stages of development so you’re not having to rope in five different departments just to get something live, but you also need to know when you’re out of your depth and it’s time to call in the people who do nothing but deal with a small subset every day.
- kkfx 4y agoThat's sure, but I mean the "general adage", most current narrative is "specialized is good, cool, the way to go, nobody want to be generic, ..." while actually all rulers, broad leaders etc need to be generic. To seems like keep crying "do not be rich! It's bad!" and now I see something I call a small reversing trends where more and more sources start stating "we need more generic/wildcard/T-shaped/$choose-a-label-not-to-say-generic-directly". I call it "a bit late, but still good".
- causality0 4y agoThe elephant in the room for almost every management-type article you ever read is that they're all correct: you just don't have the space in your head or the minutes in your day to implement five hundred different good ways of doing things.
- gonzo41 4y agoIMO, It's less about time and more about will or political power from middle management to implement a change. Inertia is a terribly oppressive force.
- WJW 4y agoThat, and resources. Every company would like to have a top tier dev team, and a top tier sales team, and competent managers at every level, and a hundred other things. But those things cost tons and tons of money, if they can be found at all.
- samwillis 4y agoMy first boss talked about "F shaped" people and encouraged me to try and develop in that way. I later discovered he was paraphrasing and extending this "T shaped" idea. This was originally described by Tim Brown of IDEO [0] fame, but as the OP explains has been extended and adapted since. I think it's a really good thing to consider earlier in your carrier, helping to enable you to be a better, rounder and more valuable contributor. In many ways HN has helped me to develop as a "F" shaped person, the breadth of content on here is invaluable for developing a wide area of knowledge. But also the depth of insight available can pull you in and take you on a development journey where you become an expert in an area. 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills
- _dain_ 4y agoOther shapes have also been proposed: X-shaped for leadership I-shaped for individual depth-skill without communication skills tree-shaped for a person with depth in many areas or branches of a field Multiple Mountains shaped (coined by Forrest Z. Shooster) for individuals with depth in overlapping several fields rather than a shallow depth in many or a singular depth in one field who specialize in the overlap between those fields Γ- and Μ-shaped individuals (gamma and mu, respectively) have been described by Brittany Fiore in her ethnographic work of data science research communities to indicate people with supporting strengths in computationally- and software-intensive fields.[3][4] Similarly, π-shaped skills (after the Greek letter pi) refer to "a broad mastery of general management skills atop a few spikes of deep functional or domain expertise".[5] what is this MBA gobbledegook
- cokeandpepsi 4y agoWell, I guess I could write a tool to translate resumes into this nonsense
- rieTohgh6 4y agoI expected this to be about 3D modeling and default pose.
- 867-5309 4y agoI came here for Roblox avatars and was disappointed
- narag 4y agoFor me it was people in the gym that skips legs day. Actually a good metaphor is absolutely required to create some ambiguity.
- dghughes 4y agoI expected it to be about Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. The t-shaped structures there I am pretty sure are meant to represent people as the theory goes.
- Borrible 4y agoSo, you're not T-shaped when you know how to pose otherwise? What about body building? You aren't T-shaped with a broad base and shoulder?
- selimthegrim 4y agoWell at least it wasn’t about the “This is my hole! It was made for me!” manga.
- larsonnn 4y agoI’m more like an H shaped human.
- rtontic 4y agoMaybe I didn't understand the article correctly, but are there any people, especially on HN, that identify as specialists? By that I mean, they only know one skill, and that's it, they don't consider themselves T shaped.
- grog454 4y agoIf you don't forage/cultivate your own food, weave your own clothes, and build your own shelter, you're a specialist. All humans are specialists and this is probably our single biggest evolutionary advantage. The trend toward increased specialization is obvious to me so this and the previous discussion about being a generalist vs. specialist are strange.
- lordnacho 4y agoGP maybe means T shaped within their specialism? Like a coder who does embedded systems but also knows a bit about how to write a webpage and how databases work.
- narag 4y agoI've seen a good amount people that identify themselves as DB people or QA people or sysadmins and wanted to know nothing outside their corner of the woods. As in "don't even explain that to me, just do your part" that was often a source of problems. Once a client demanded that we worked with some encryption framework that required open ports. A delegation of the crypto company had to come to spend the day and hold some meetings because the networks people couldn't take my word for it.
- fsloth 4y agoMaybe the militant single domain focus posture is not driven only by personal values but has something to do with how organization pressures and rewards people? Chastising people for doing things out of the scope of their responsibility is a thing I hear.
- 4y ago
- js8 4y agoI think pi-shaped is even better, connect two fields which you know deeply.
- sparsely 4y agoUpvote if you identify as T-shaped
- magicloop 4y agoRather than trying to be T-shaped, I think it is better to be curious and follow up learning paths on those innate feelings for exploration. Maybe your skill set becomes fractal looking. I think this can be the basis for unique value creation. (E.g. the typography course Steve Jobs did as a student, leading to care/attention to fonts on the early Macs). I do agree with the basic idea of being T-shaped, however. I've personally seen project teams having fragile delivery capability due to a lack of skills, or lack of skill overlaps, which made the team reliant on individuals that could be off sick, on vacation, or assigned elsewhere.
- moffkalast 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competent_man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competent_man Should be pretty easy to con a ship at least, ships aren't that smart /s
- gardenhedge 4y agoSome MBA thought.. why should experts just do what they're an expert in? They should do everything! Why should generalists be so broad.. they should be an expert in some things!
- kypro 4y agoI was working a corporate job a few years back and I guess our boss heard about the benefits of "T-shaped" people / teams. Anyway to improve productivity it was decided the whole dev team would participate in a half day training course about "T-shaped" people. It was your typical corporate training nonsense, a hour of watching videos, weird team activities including making animal noises with blindfolds on, playing with lego, etc. The training was concluded by explaining we should no longer pigeon-hole ourselves to duties that fit our job description and if we have capacity in our sprint to pick up other duties. The whole thing was a disaster. We had backend devs doing frontend development with jQuery when we were using Vue. Frontend devs started doing UX design and things looked like trash. QA was done by basically anyone so as you can imagine bugs started appearing everywhere. I think this is one of those things that makes sense in theory, but is kinda hard to implement within a corporate structure. As a generalist and someone who came from a startup back ground, I used to find the way corporates pigeon-hole individuals into specific roles quite constraining, but I've come to appreciate that having experts and very explicit duties does make a lot of sense from a quality and accountability perspective. Smaller companies and teams can probably benefit from having their employees wear different hats, but in larger teams I think it's good to exploit the specific expertise of individuals as much as possible.
- andrepd 4y ago>It was your typical corporate training nonsense, a hour of watching videos, weird team activities including making animal noises with blindfolds on, playing with lego, etc Tangent, but what is it with corporate teambuilding and this sort of games? I had to participate in one where people had to crawl on the floor, blindfolds on, while the "master" gave commands....... I mean come on, sounds like a fun evening, but in that context it left me quite uncomfortable.
- AlbertoGP 4y agoIt’s the usual hazing ritual, where the alpha manager gets to mark their territory.
- wellanyway 4y ago
- signaru 4y agoT-shaped is good, but preferably skills are organically acquired. In my previous work, the T-shaped mantra has been naively pushed and used as an excuse to put employees on all sorts of disjoint activities and trainings that took time away from the main deliverables. This caused people to leave. I instead prefer "JIT learning".
- jstx1 4y agoJIT learning is a great skill to have but if it's all you do, it becomes unrewarding over long periods of time. There's something very satisfying about executing stuff that you know how to do well, and you're missing out on time spent in a flow state if you're constantly JIT learning. The quality of your work is lower when JIT learning too. Of course if you only do stuff you know well, you stagnate and get bored, so you need to balance it out.
- random_kris 4y agoI like to do JIT on a prototypes and then use the knowledge to fall into flow state when working on the real product. Once that gets boring time for a new prototypes
- danielvaughn 4y agoI feel the same. It's also just very mentally taxing to learn on the fly. Because usually, I'm trying to develop a feature and I feel the pressure of delivering on time. I find it difficult to learn even on the best days, and if I'm stressed, it makes it much harder to concentrate.
- vsareto 4y agoJIT is great if the things happen to interest you. JIT suuuuuucks if you don't like what you're learning and someone is always telling you what to learn. But even the first situation can fail if you are under constant pressure and deadlines with no breathing room because it sours the enjoyment of learning.
- vivegi 4y agoThe first time I heard this term was around the same time as the article (around 2018) from a couple of McKinsey folks who were consultants to our company. That was some of the top rate BS I had to encounter.
- cuteboy19 4y agoIt has by now trickled down to all levels of corporate consulting
- bjornsing 4y agoThe main benefit of being T-shaped is that you can innovate more effectively within your area of (deep) expertise. Since you have a good understanding of the solution space and a “good enough” understanding of the problem space you can search from both sides so to speak, finding the most valuable problem that can be solved economically. It’s very hard for an I-shaped engineer working with a (problem) domain expert to be as innovative: no matter how much they communicate it will always be a tiny fraction of the internal bandwidth of a single brain.
- mrfumier 4y agoFirst time I heard about T-shaped people was at a course at Stanford University in 2010s. The idea was that you could be an excellent biologist or developer, but you always need the transversal skills like interpersonal communication, public speaking, entrepreneurship... It made sense for me at that time.
- mkl95 4y agoBased on the EU job postings I browse on LinkedIn, since hiring freezes started there is a trend towards hiring specialists over T-shaped guys. 2020-2022 was a T-shaped heavy market.
- Caitlynbranson 4y ago[dead]
- satvikpendem 4y agoI heard about T shaped people before, and several years ago, I thought, why stop at T? I wanted to become a block shaped person. I wanted to be like the autodidacts and polymaths of old, Newton, da Vinci, Franklin, and I wanted to know as much as I could about as many things as I could, at least in the software world. Since then, I started teaching myself concepts from the ground up in any software field you could imagine; compilers, programming language theory, category theory, functional programming, low level embedded systems, front end web design and development, backend development, devops, networking, data structures and algorithms, databases, distributed systems, operating systems, you name it, I've done at least some of it. So far it's been the best intellectual investment of my life. I just know so much about how stuff works now that I didn't before and it feels great. I'm also interested in entrepreneurship and building SaaS products, so I also had to teach myself sales and marketing, product design, the UX process including interviewing potential customers, and so on, which are whole fields in themselves, but now I can confidently say that I can design and code a product from scratch, market it, and have a decently high chance of it being successful. If anyone else has the time, I highly recommend getting acquainted with these various fields, you may think they're unrelated but you'd be surprised, I've often found overlap between disparate fields where they fixed the very problem I was facing in a different field.
- rzmd 4y agoHow did you go about doing this, in a practical sense?
- satvikpendem 4y agoTeach Yourself CS [0] is a great resource. For other fields, I just went through courses on Coursera, MIT OpenCourseWare, etc or the various recommended books and followed along. For example for learning about interpreters, I'm using the book Crafting Interpreters [1] and doing it in Haskell, learning it from the book Haskell Programming From First Principles [2]. If you go to any school's CS degree program and go through their list of courses, you can basically do them for free by watching the videos and doing the assignments. This is what Scott Young did [3]. [0] https://teachyourselfcs.com https://teachyourselfcs.com [1] https://craftinginterpreters.com https://craftinginterpreters.com [2] https://haskellbook.com https://haskellbook.com [3] https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/myprojects/mit-challenge-2/ https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/myprojects/mit-challenge-2/
- drewcoo 4y agoWhat shape of person doesn't read the article but boldly counter-claims things the article actually says? It seems like that's a pretty common shape.
- sigmonsays 4y agoif I hold my arms up, i'm T shaped.
- bena 4y agoIf I'm going to be honest, at first I did think that this was going to be about why humans are morphologically shaped the way we are.
- WesSouza 4y agoBecause broad shoulders are attractive.
- toolslive 4y ago[Off topic] Honestly, I was expecting this to be about Gobekli Tepe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe#/media/File:%C5%9Eanl%C4%B1urfa_M%C3%BCzesi_G%C3%B6beklitepe_D_Tap%C4%B1na%C4%9F%C4%B1.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe#/media/File:... Maybe I'm watching too many documentaries.
- bastian 4y agoThe definition of a t-shaped person here is wrong. I always understood it as: An individual who has empathy and ability to collaborate across disciplines coupled with deep knowledge in a specific area. Based on Tom Kelly (IDEO), probably 2005
- Communitivity 4y agoThe value of T shaped people is overhyped. We know the benefits of in depth study in an area as well as entry-level study in many areas: eased collaboration, cross-disciplinary thinking, etc. My problem with T-shaped people is not the concept, but that the concept doesn't go far enough. I have at various times used the phrase 'Pitchfork People' and 'M-Shaped people' to represent what I think our goals should be. M-shaped people have an entry level understanding across a broad area of subjects, preferably cross-discipline, and a deep dive specialist-level understanding of two and possibly three areas. Heinlein said it best, "Specialization is for insects"
- helen___keller 4y agoIf it takes X years experience to gain I-shaped expertise and Y years experience to gain generalist expertise, it should follow that it takes roughly X + Y years to gain T shaped expertise It might not be exactly linear, but you should consider that by committing to a team of T shaped engineers you’re also committing to a team of very highly qualified and very expensive engineers.
- jasonhansel 4y agoI wish that these sorts of articles were written based on statistical or experimental evidence, rather than just anecdotes and intuition.
- shagie 4y agoI am more of a fan of Kent Beck's "Paint Drip People" ( https://twitter.com/kentbeck/status/761223760091320320?lang=en https://twitter.com/kentbeck/status/761223760091320320?lang=... ) (and a commentary on it - https://becarneiro.medium.com/generalist-or-specialist-welcome-to-the-paintdrip-model-bb310d8255dd https://becarneiro.medium.com/generalist-or-specialist-welco... ) The original used to be available without needing to log in, but now it appears to be hidden behind a login at https://www.facebook.com/notes/373922293851423/ https://www.facebook.com/notes/373922293851423/ The text of it: Keith Adams worked on kernels at VM Ware. Then virtual machines. Then search performance at Facebook. Then the HHVM implementation of PHP. Then machine learning. Now he’s Chief Architect at Slack. In between he worked on hundreds of little projects that lasted hours or days or weeks. Keith is a Paint Drip Person. I was a big fan of the T model of skills, introduced by David Guest in 1991: know about a lot of things, be really good at one. The more I taught it, the more unhappy I got with the metaphor: - Skilled people are good at several things. - Skilled people’s interests develop over time. - Skilled people don’t plan their next focus area. Sometimes it seems completely unrelated to their previous focus area. - Skilled people are always exploring, just for the sake of curiosity. - Skilled people resurrect interests sometimes. All of these metaphor fails led me to the paint drip model of skills. - You draw a brush across the top of the canvas. - Sometimes enough paint accumulates that a drip starts to roll. - Once a drip starts to roll, it’s not clear how far it will go. - You keep drawing the brush across the canvas, regardless. “Moving the brush” is the curious exploration. Keith reports that he tries a project a week or so, but that most “don’t go anywhere” (I beg to differ). The drip rolling down is an area of specialization. Once it starts rolling, it’s not clear how far it will go. In any case, the brush keeps moving. Eventually the last drip stops and a new one starts.
- 1970-01-01 4y agoIf you start looking for T-shaped people, you can be sued. The Tetris Company owns the copyright and trademark on all seven tetrominoes. And why waste time? All you need is the 10x "Heaven" person: https://xkcd.com/888/ https://xkcd.com/888/
- curioustrex 4y agoI worked at a small company for 7 years and had to work with databases, server management, product ownership, front-end/back-end, styling etc. With only 4 developers, we all were expected to do everything. I always thought this was normal expectation for a full-stack developer. Then I switched jobs to a bigger organization and became surprised by the number of people who claim to be full-stack but are uncable of developing an application from nothning.
- mhss 4y agoThis is very common coming from small shops and moving to larger orgs. I am happy to have started my career gradually going from very small to medium to larger orgs. I think it's made me a much more well rounded dev. A lot of people that go straight into very large organizations have the disadvantage of narrowly focusing on a piece of software and often their learning is slower because of organizational complexity. At (good) smaller companies you have much more freedom to experiment and make mistakes, which is essential for learning fast.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- vsareto 4y agoDoes anyone feel like this model is stretched really thin? Like, tech has a problem of easily identifying who's competent or not and has to do tech interviews to (try to) establish that. I feel like establishing if someone is an expert or represents one of these shapes is going to be even harder.
- nayuki 4y agoI mistakenly thought this was about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-pose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-pose (apparently NSFW) in 3D graphics.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- JKCalhoun 4y agoIn my career I often found myself thrown into a situation where I have no expertise whatsoever. That was always a little anxiety inducing. How is this white midwesterner who knows only English going to handle displaying Japanese ruby text in epubs? Or implement the epub table of contents (TOC) for vertical Japanese? I didn't even know Japanese ruby existed before the task of implementing it landed in my lap. Thanks top the web, googling, and a few coworkers with a little expertise (and CoreText on Mac OS) was how. I am by no means an expert now in Japanese ruby, or even CoreText, but I love how I am a lot less ignorant about these things too. Ignorant of PDF until I was told to support it more deeply in Cocoa (Mac OS). Ignorant of color theory and color management until I was pulled into the ColorSync team. Ignorant of image metadata, XMP, or even XML parsers until image metadata support also landed in my lap. Display prefs, display calibrator, Common Cartridge.... It's funny how many things land in your lap when you are a kind of "gofer" for your team, ha ha. Each time, as I said, I felt disoriented, anxious, worried I would be able to implement the feature. But after so many weeks of struggling, and eventual success, I have come to treasure those experiences.
- laserlight 4y agoJust like you, I was once thrown into color science without knowing anything about it. ColorSync helped me a lot in understanding how gamut mapping worked. Thanks for your work.
- JKCalhoun 4y agoYou and me both. It turned out ColorSync was pretty cool.
- batmansmom1 4y agoI remember this from back when the Valve employee handbook was released: https://jgreaser.wordpress.com/2015/06/26/valves-t-shaped-model-employee/ https://jgreaser.wordpress.com/2015/06/26/valves-t-shaped-mo... https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployeeHandbook.pdf https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployee... I've always wondered if they were the ones to come up with this or if it was taken from somewhere else?
- bill_from_tampa 4y agoI was greatly disappointed - I was expecting an analysis of the T-shaped monoliths at Gobleki Tepe which are adorned with carvings indicative of them representing people. I have suspected for years that the peculiar "T-shape" to the heads was due to the columns being used as supports for a wooden roof which has long since disappeared, and the humanization carvings were just secondary decoration. Ah well I didn't even know there was a loop to be so far out of...