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.
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).
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.