[mrVentures]

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.

[ironmagma]

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]

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]

The part about Elon Musk could just mean that he is not as T-shaped as he thinks he is.

[Topolomancer]

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).

[Topolomancer]

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]

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]

> 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.

[tomrod]

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

[zamadatix]

> 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.

[airstrike]

> 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.

[drawkbox]

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_NewEmployee...