Paint drip people, a successor to T-shaped people
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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.
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.
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.
"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."
Of course now our abstract analogy is converging with the physical reality of what we're talking about. ;)
Sometimes I feel like my life would be much easier if I could just focus on one or a small few things :-)
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/
http://www.reinventingorganizationswiki.com/Teal_Organizatio...
I say screw the metaphors and just understand what skills people have as you need to, because simple categories are only useful for simple decisions.
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...
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.
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
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.)
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.
At various points I was fairly certain that the entirety of all my dependencies were written by no more than three individual people.
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.
"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?
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.
This article seems to be a decent approach as well. I like a lot of what James Hauge has to say.
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.
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."