T-Shaped People
A few gigs ago, I had a boss who was trying to single-handedly move the organization in which he found himself into the future of agile and dev ops. This was 2012, and agile wasn't a thing enterprises did, let alone mid-sized adware companies.
Garrett (my boss) liked to talk about T-shaped people. "We need more T-shaped people in this company." We were always trying to hire T's, instead of I's.
I left that job — not because of Garrett; he left a year before I did — but I still think a lot about his optimistic, borderline quixotic quest, and his T-shaped people.
Last week, someone asked me what she should do to reach my
level of expertise comfort with technology.
I get asked this often, and I don't have a really good answer —
primarily because I don't think there is any single, specific
thing that I did to get where I'm at. I think I just lucked
into being a T-shaped person.
In my daily work, I bring to bear all manner of weird and unusual disciplines and experiences. I once spent a summer compiling Linux kernels just to see if I could do it. I tried to write a Zork-like adventure game using an Apple ][e and learned first-hand why functions and recursion are a good thing. Most of my troubleshooting experience, summed up as Check Your Assumptions, derives from a decade of making bone-headed assumptions and wishing desperately to avoid the embarrassment again.
I'm a T-shaped person, and if you want to excel in whatever you do, I think you need to be a T-shaped person too.
James works on the Internet, spends his weekends developing new and interesting bits of software and his nights trying to make sense of research papers.
Currently exploring just how much data you can shove though DuckDB before it explodes.