Why T-shaped people? (2018)

I was working a corporate job a few years back and I guess our boss heard about the benefits of &quot;T-shaped&quot; people &#x2F; teams.<p>Anyway to improve productivity it was decided the whole dev team would participate in a half day training course about &quot;T-shaped&quot; 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;s good to exploit the specific expertise of individuals as much as possible.

I 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.<p>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&#x27;ve done at least some of it. So far it&#x27;s been the best intellectual investment of my life. I just know so much about how stuff works now that I didn&#x27;t before and it feels great.<p>I&#x27;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.<p>If anyone else has the time, I highly recommend getting acquainted with these various fields, you may think they&#x27;re unrelated but you&#x27;d be surprised, I&#x27;ve often found overlap between disparate fields where they fixed the very problem I was facing in a different field.

I expected this to be about 3D modeling and default pose.

Rather 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&#x2F;attention to fonts on the early Macs).<p>I do agree with the basic idea of being T-shaped, however. I&#x27;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.

My first boss talked about &quot;F shaped&quot; people and encouraged me to try and develop in that way. I later discovered he was paraphrasing and extending this &quot;T shaped&quot; idea.<p>This was originally described by Tim Brown of IDEO [0] fame, but as the OP explains has been extended and adapted since.<p>I think it&#x27;s a really good thing to consider earlier in your carrier, helping to enable you to be a better, rounder and more valuable contributor.<p>In many ways HN has helped me to develop as a &quot;F&quot; 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.<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;T-shaped_skills" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;T-shaped_skills</a>

T-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 &quot;JIT learning&quot;.

I am more of a fan of Kent Beck&#x27;s &quot;Paint Drip People&quot; ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;kentbeck&#x2F;status&#x2F;761223760091320320?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;kentbeck&#x2F;status&#x2F;761223760091320320?lang=...</a> ) (and a commentary on it - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;becarneiro.medium.com&#x2F;generalist-or-specialist-welcome-to-the-paintdrip-model-bb310d8255dd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;becarneiro.medium.com&#x2F;generalist-or-specialist-welco...</a> )<p>The original used to be available without needing to log in, but now it appears to be hidden behind a login at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;notes&#x2F;373922293851423&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;notes&#x2F;373922293851423&#x2F;</a><p>The text of it:<p>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.<p>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:<p><pre><code> - 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. </code></pre> All of these metaphor fails led me to the paint drip model of skills.<p><pre><code> - 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. </code></pre> “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.

In my career I often found myself thrown into a situation where I have no expertise whatsoever. That was always a little anxiety inducing.<p>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&#x27;t even know Japanese ruby existed before the task of implementing it landed in my lap.<p>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.<p>Ignorant of PDF until I was told to support it more deeply in Cocoa (Mac OS).<p>Ignorant of color theory and color management until I was pulled into the ColorSync team.<p>Ignorant of image metadata, XMP, or even XML parsers until image metadata support also landed in my lap.<p>Display prefs, display calibrator, Common Cartridge.... It&#x27;s funny how many things land in your lap when you are a kind of &quot;gofer&quot; for your team, ha ha.<p>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.

Maybe I didn&#x27;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&#x27;s it, they don&#x27;t consider themselves T shaped.

I worked at a small company for 7 years and had to work with databases, server management, product ownership, front-end&#x2F;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.<p>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.

The 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.<p>That was some of the top rate BS I had to encounter.

Everybody agrees high quality talent is great. Sick of articles lauding the obvious.

Some MBA thought.. why should experts just do what they&#x27;re an expert in? They should do everything!<p>Why should generalists be so broad.. they should be an expert in some things!

The 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&#x27;t go far enough. I have at various times used the phrase &#x27;Pitchfork People&#x27; and &#x27;M-Shaped people&#x27; 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.<p>Heinlein said it best, &quot;Specialization is for insects&quot;

I remember this from back when the Valve employee handbook was released:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jgreaser.wordpress.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;26&#x2F;valves-t-shaped-model-employee&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jgreaser.wordpress.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;06&#x2F;26&#x2F;valves-t-shaped-mo...</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net&#x2F;apps&#x2F;valve&#x2F;Valve_NewEmployeeHandbook.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net&#x2F;apps&#x2F;valve&#x2F;Valve_NewEmployee...</a><p>I&#x27;ve always wondered if they were the ones to come up with this or if it was taken from somewhere else?

I think pi-shaped is even better, connect two fields which you know deeply.

If 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<p>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.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Competent_man" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Competent_man</a><p>Should be pretty easy to con a ship at least, ships aren&#x27;t that smart &#x2F;s

I 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 &quot;T-shape&quot; 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.<p>Ah well I didn&#x27;t even know there was a loop to be so far out of...

[Off topic] Honestly, I was expecting this to be about Gobekli Tepe.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe#&#x2F;media&#x2F;File:%C5%9Eanl%C4%B1urfa_M%C3%BCzesi_G%C3%B6beklitepe_D_Tap%C4%B1na%C4%9F%C4%B1.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe#&#x2F;media&#x2F;File:...</a><p>Maybe I&#x27;m watching too many documentaries.

Does anyone feel like this model is stretched really thin? Like, tech has a problem of easily identifying who&#x27;s competent or not and has to do tech interviews to (try to) establish that.<p>I feel like establishing if someone is an expert or represents one of these shapes is going to be even harder.

First time I heard about T-shaped people was at a course at Stanford University in 2010s.<p>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...<p>It made sense for me at that time.

The 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

I mistakenly thought this was about <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;T-pose" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;T-pose</a> (apparently NSFW) in 3D graphics.

Based 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.

What shape of person doesn&#x27;t read the article but boldly counter-claims things the article actually says?<p>It seems like that&#x27;s a pretty common shape.

I wish that these sorts of articles were written based on statistical or experimental evidence, rather than just anecdotes and intuition.

The 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.<p>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.

Because broad shoulders are attractive.

If 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 &quot;Heaven&quot; person: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;888&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;888&#x2F;</a>

if I hold my arms up, i&#x27;m T shaped.

I’m more like an H shaped human.

Upvote if you identify as T-shaped