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Damn it, they gave it a name. Now we can expect a lot of pop-psychology/business media bullshit about this concept for the coming decade.
But yeah, this article generally captures my thoughts about the "T-shaped employee" thing, except that I personally want to be "bicycle-wheel shaped" human. First, a human, because my employment does not define me, and by "bicycle-wheel", for lack of better term, I mean many specializations in different areas that end up connecting with each other.
As for the feasability of the "T-shaped" vs "paint drip", I think the latter is better - sure, ceteris paribus, you won't be able to put as much energy into many things as you can put in one, but I believe there are diminishing returns in specializations - and since the job market, like most markets, is terribly inefficient, you can probably get away with multiple specializations up until robots replace us all.
> by "bicycle-wheel", for lack of better term, I mean many specializations in different areas that end up connecting with each other.
This is the part that really resonates with me.
I'm one of those people that naturally has way too many interests and hobbies than there are hours in the day. What I find time and again is that as I go far enough into some new interest, it starts to converge and connect to my other ones. I see similarities, or ideas where I can combine multiple interests to produce something that I couldn't make with just one of them.
These days, I don't even really see separation between them. I'm just a big amorphous blob of all of this stuff, jumbled together. The jumbling together is way more important than any constituent part.
> What I find time and again is that as I go far enough into some new interest, it starts to converge and connect to my other ones. I see similarities, or ideas where I can combine multiple interests to produce something that I couldn't make with just one of them.
I've experienced the same thing. I used to joke that if you go far enough in any discipline, you'll end up in philosophy and abstract math. But it's more than that. Reality does not recognize specializations and boundaries. Reality is that "amorphous blob of all of this stuff, jumbled together". Drawing boundaries help us make sense of the world, but it's important to recognize boundaries are somewhat arbitrary and we're free to redraw them to fit our needs better.
Somewhat related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosoph...
"Clicking on the first lowercase link in the main text of a Wikipedia article, and then repeating the process for subsequent articles, usually eventually gets one to the Philosophy article. As of May 26, 2011, 94.52% of all articles in Wikipedia lead eventually to the article Philosophy."
I feel like I am one of these people too. However, sometimes it seems really stressful (for me at least). I feel the pull of too many directions. Given such varied interests, how do you stay productive and get things done?
Sometimes I feel like my life would be much easier if I could just focus on one or a small few things :-)
> However, sometimes it seems really stressful (for me at least).
Yeah, it stresses me out too. Especially now that I have kids and my time is really limited, it's frustrating not being able to follow my interests as much as I like.
I try to do two things:
1. Deliberately triage my time. I intentionally choose what I'm not going to spend time on. It's really easy to ask myself, "Should I spend time on ___?" The answer is always "yes!" So, instead, I force myself to answer, "What am I not going to spend time on?" The only way one project can blossom is if I don't spread my limited sunshine too thin.
So, right now, there are tons of games I'd like to be working on that I'm not. I'd like to write fiction but I've decided not too. Likewise music. There's a ton of little experiments and one-off projects that I just say, "Eh, I don't really need to do this."
That helps me focus on the few things I am still doing. (Right now, it's a second book on programming language interpreters, my hobby language Wren[1], and to a lesser extent photography[2].)
2. The above point is too heartbreaking to do on its own. I care about all of my weird little interests and hobbies too much to bury them forever. So the other thing I do is remind myself that I'm not killing a project, I'm postponing it. It's not, "Am I ever going to do this?" It's, "Am I going to interrupt one of the other projects I have going on to do it right now?"
That makes it easier to put things on ice. I know there can be a point in the future where I'll get back to it. And, when I do, it will be more fun because I won't be overwhelmed by other projects.
I am also willing to table projects. With many things, I work on it for a while, and then put it down and work on something else. Sometimes it takes me years to get back to it. That used to bother me a lot but now I just figure it's how I work. (It does cause problems for stuff that's open source, though, because contributors may not want me to put it on ice.)
I do still feel stretched thin a lot, but it's not as crazy-making as it used to be.
[1]: http://wren.io/
But a bicycle's spokes all connect at the same point (the hub). How about a neural network?
Of course now our abstract analogy is converging with the physical reality of what we're talking about. ;)
I think "you" are the hub. The spokes are your interests going in seemingly different directions. Once you reach a certain length on the spoke (proficiency) you then get to the tire which is the realisation that you can see how it all links, and works, together.
We should all start claiming that our shapes can only be described in higher dimensions.
I've always tried to be a tesseract, though I can understand the mobius strip approach.
I … am a point.
Paint drip people are essential to any effective teal organisation. It's all about combining strategy and vision to enact change.
I've found myself unable to leverage any synergies without paint drip people.
"Paint drip" as a descriptor is not very insightful. Paint drip shape is simply what you get when you lay out all our skills horizontally and assign random depths to each one. Everyone is a paint drip shaped person by default.
Isn't that the point, though—that it's a better metaphor for people and their skills, than a T-shape?
I'd expect a "bicycle-wheel" human to be someone who is under great stress from all sides, and is getting no support from those directly below him.
I'm thinking of the tension pattern in the spokes of a rotating loaded wheel: https://imgur.com/yzaVEJO Source: http://people.duke.edu/%7Ehpgavin/papers/HPGavin-Wheel-Paper...
I prefer octagram!!!
The terms has always been "t-shaped skills" or "t-shaped people." That fact that it's primarily used to describe desirable characteristics of employees is secondary at best.
This goes along with the notion that the typical STEM person is interested in music/art/etc. about as much as the average person, but the typical Nobel Prize winner has a vastly higher interest in these alternative activities than the average person:
http://priceonomics.com/the-correlation-between-arts-and-cra...
I think the idea of being an "expert in a field" is becoming less valuable today than it used to be. Because there are so many experts in so many fields, they all share the same knowledge, ideas, and preconceptions, and thus the only way to make further progress is to incorporate original ideas from other fields. It goes along with the study that showed that interdisciplinary research has lower citations in the short-term, but many more citations in the long-term.
Historically, there seem to have been many more multi-disciplinary experts[1], it's simply the last few centuries where academic specialisation has been the norm.
My general belief has always been that such things were driven by wealth inequality that allowed small numbers of people to dedicate themselves highly to the pursuit of general academia, which was out of reach for the general masses, and so they could be the leaders of many fields. (Although I will be the first to admit that I have little evidence for it, it simply seems a likely explanation given the historical context.)
Potentially this is a re-incarnation of the same phenomenon - we've reached a point where somebody who is successful enough within their field is given immense freedom to explore other areas.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath plus anecdotal considerations of every Greek you can remember
Honestly, I think another reason for so many ancient polymaths is that the fields themselves were less developed, and took less time to fully learn. I in no way want to put down Renaissance polymaths, who were tremendously impressive, but it simply takes less time to learn up to the cutting edge of mathematics or chemistry in 1660 than 2016.
You're hitting on a pretty interesting concept here. There's been an awful lot of ink spilt on the increased (and generally characterised as over-specialisation) of academic studies. "An expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing."
Contrasting with earlier times -- generally prior to the Industrial Revolution, though somewhere between the 19th and 20th century seems to be where the shift occurred -- I'm wondering what the factors are.
Preindustrial societies couldn't support a great many independent researchers, and those almost always had specific patronage (with its own sets of advantages and pitfalls). The goal was to become known as "that clever person" without much limitation as to what it was you were clever about.
The fruit hung lower. There's much been made of areas in which obvious principles were waiting to be plucked.
In a professional research environment, there are many curious path-dependent and self-reinforcing tendencies. "Publish or perish" means you must publish even where you've got little to report. The fact of publishing is often more important than the content. We have those who've published hundreds or thousands of papers, and dozens or hundreds of books (Asimov comes to mind). And those who've published two, but revolutionised thought (Wittgenstein).
Organisation and regimentation of inquiry tends to lead to a cloistering of concepts. An institution or discipline is started with a specific point in mind.
There's the close-mindedness of specific disciplines, one instance noted by Herman Daly in a recent book review, pointing to a footnote in his book Beyond Growth:
"I sent MIT Press, at their solicitation, a collection of essays on sustainable development, an earlier incarnation of this book. They sent it out for review, and on the basis of three positive reviews, wrote a contract to publish, subject to my doing further editing work. This I did, and sent in the revised manuscript. Some months later I was informed that a distinguished economist on their editorial advisory committee was not happy with the book and wanted more reviews. Did the distinguished economist have specific criticisms? No, I was told, he had not read the manuscript, but just wanted more reviews as a matter of procedure. Not to worry, MIT Press was still committed to publishing the book. So they sent the manuscript out for two more reviews. One was positive, the other was extremely negative. That made a total of five reviewers, all of MIT Press's own choosing, of which four said publish, and one said do not publish. The negative review "trumped" the four positive reviews, and the press broke its contract. The basic thrust of the negative review, leaving aside ad hominem irrelevancies, was "That is not the right way to look at it." All of this was the more surprising because I had recently published a collection with MIT Press that was well received (Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics, ed. H. Daly and K. Townsend [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993])."
H. Daly, Beyond Growth, fn. 5 on p. 225.
Mentioned in Daly's review of Collision Course:
"It is also refreshing to me that MIT Press published her book. This indicates the welcome likelihood that some anonymous member of the MIT department of economics no longer has a veto over the decisions of the MIT Press."
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-04-02/collision-cours...
A rather striking instance of Plank's observation that "Science advances one funeral at a time". (Or non-funereal loss of veto power, possibly.)
This is more interesting.. I think all science is basically interdisciplinary and with new technology requires stats and math support.
The "paint drip" approach is great for people who can pull it off, and the opening account of Keith Adams is inspiring. But that same approach to life also is a pretty apt description of low-focus, easily distracted people.
I interviewed a job candidate once who had five masters degrees in unrelated fields. In the first five minutes, he sounded amazing. By about minute 15, I realized that his completion rate was very close to zero. And that made it hard for me to think of any job where he'd be effective.
Diverse interests can be great. A commitment to life-long learning is inherently a huge plus. But cohesion (even if it's slow and accidental) feels like it needs to be the third part of the formula.
Following the drip down the canvas is as important as moving the brush along (to stay with the metaphor).
A really good example of this would be TJ, who is known in the JS community as one of the authors of Express.js and has done a lot of Node.js-related stuff. But I follow TJ on twitter and he does a lot of unrelated work and has started a company recently [3]. Another good example would be Elon Musk, whom I think needs no introduction here.
We have an ongoing joke at our office where we ask if TJ wrote it. It being a package we're adding to our project. Was true more often in the past, but its still funny.
Wasn't there a theory a while back that TJ was not even a real person, but a collective, simply because of how many things he was involved in?
In the Node ecosystem there was actually more than one person like that -- substack being another obvious example if you're into micro modules (he actually has more modules on npm now than TJ).
At various points I was fairly certain that the entirety of all my dependencies were written by no more than three individual people.
Very interesting metaphor. I would say that skilled peoe don't always plan their next project, but I do on occasion.
I can strongly relate to having a lot of little side projects however. That seems to be where I learn the most stuff. I've even turned a lot of programming class projects into more ambitious side projects at times.
I've also found that I often have to attempt a technology or system more than once before I get properly comfortable with it. It seems to have worked that way with Go, Phoenix/Elixir, Postgres, Love2d, and so on. My ability to do well in programming has more to do with many side hours spent researching and playing. New stuff takes a bit to settle in.
A lot of the attributes of "skilled people" could apply to all people. For instance:
"Skilled people don’t plan their next focus area. Sometimes it seems completely unrelated to their previous focus area."
So does this mean we should not plan our next focus area? What if someone is naturally inclined to plan their focus area, should they resist the urge?
An important caveat to not planning your next focus area is that you need to also always be exploring.
Also there are the people whose proficiencies follow a Gaussian distribution, otherwise known as "Normal people".
I'm quibbling, but: I think the pareto distribution is more realistic than the gaussian. ("80% of your capability is allocated to 20% of your skills")
Does anyone else think that these simplistic reductions/analogies are woefully inadequate for actually understanding the people you encounter and work with?
Yes, but they're great at driving traffic to your blog. Welcome to 2016. :(
(To paraphrase the discussion)... All metaphors are wrong, but some metaphors are useful...
I guess this is a good place for me to ask how do people prioritize what to learn? Also what are your steps to learning something. My recurring issue is that most books/resources stop at this semi intermediate level, and then you are on your own. And figuring out how to progress is sometimes a bit too time consuming.
My strategy has been to think of a project to do, and then to try to match my tech to that. For instance, I picked up a bit of Love2D at LudumDare 34. Sometimes it works in reverse, I wrote a blog engine for junglecoder.com because I wanted to learn Go and the nature of running servers on the web better. But I have also had a lot of time my hands in the past, so YMMV. After a certain point, programming become more about logistics than individual effort. Another good way to prioritize what to learn, especially if you don't have any good ideas, is to follow where the money flows. If you want to make small contract websites, PHP is a decent choice (as much as I'd never choose it myself, but I have taste issues). C# is about the easiest way to get started on windows for just about anything. Elixir seems like a promising tech, especially with what Phoenix has on offer. Programming is time consuming in the real world, unless you're deep in your comfort zone, but that place has often already been automated anyway.
This article seems to be a decent approach as well. I like a lot of what James Hauge has to say.
Lol my issue isn't with lack of ideas its hat I have too many things I want to learn. But yeah project based learning is a given.
I'm not actually talking about programming, I like to think of myself as somewhat experienced, but I'd like to get for example into 3D modeling and I'm not sure where to start.
I'm not saying I'm a paint drip person, but for me it has been either what I'm interested in or what the current job requires. I never expected that I'd learn so much about growing corn, but that's what a current work project involves. On my own, I've been learning about ASP.Net Core 1.0 and JavaScript.
For me, it's mostly about projects: I've got something in mind that I want to do, and there's a number of things that I need to learn to accomplish it.
Also, the thing with books, even the in depth ones like Code Complete, is that no book can give you experience in taking an idea and making it real, and that is the core of software development, especially when you are working solo and don't have a boss handing down detailed requirements.
Interesting analogy. I think this captures the paths of creatives more than large company people. The T-model is great for consulting firms (like McKinsey who uses it) as well as conglomerates like P&G. Catching the interest of someone who can move from Operating Systems to compilers to website design is very different.
The one thing I'd add to this is Paint Drip people tend to bring what they learned from one area to others. It's not so just disjointed and random "let's see what drips."
It's worth reading some of Keith's posts about systems and OS on Quora, some of the most interesting stuff I've seen on those topics: https://www.quora.com/profile/Keith-Adams
And so the circle of metaphors continues.
I think I didn't understood the analogy! Is he basically saying that people with natural curiosity explore and do lots of different things?
T-shapes, paint drip...
Dos this means squares are the best kind of people?