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If you're a "short and fat" engineer, and you know it, it's very hard to stay that way, and also stay in engineering. Either you become a T-shaped engineer, or you move out of engineering to apply your broad-but-shallow knowledge in ways that elevate others (e.g. PM work).

"Short and fat" is a transitionary state. Staying there is just logistically hard, not to mention handicapping in situations where being deeper in one specific area would help.

>met exactly one short fat engineer with >5yrs of exp that I was impressed by

I'll go so far as to say that they don't really exist. I'm not sure how you can spend 5 years and not learn at least one thing in depth. You'd have to rotate technologies every 6-12 months and there's not that many technologies.

On the spectrum from compilers to machine learning to frontend, there are plenty of technologies.

> I'm not sure how you can spend 5 years and not learn at least one thing in depth. You'd have to rotate technologies every 6-12 months and there's not that many technologies.

That's kinda how SV is these days though. It's very common for engineers to jump companies every 1-2 years for a long period of time and the companies very frequently undergo a shift in technologies while engineers are there. So, unless you join FAANG or some super stable company - I could see it being natural from just how the market works that you end up having a very short fat engineering career.

For myself, the only consistent thing from my five jobs over the last 7-8 years is that they've all had JavaScript (actually - one had CoffeeScript but then we migrated to JavaScript when I was leaving) - but that's mostly just because of the nature of web development. In the middle of my sixth job search right now and it's looking to be a backend role that won't be in JS now. So, there goes that stability...

Personally: fullstack LAMP -> fullstack Python + Django -> frontend role with backbone/knockout/angular and majority of vanilla JS and CSS -> fullstack Python + Django + CoffeeScript -> Fullstack Angular + Node -> Backend Node with shift to TypeScript near the end

You wouldn't say you have deep knowledge of JS & front end frameworks?

Nope. My frontend knowledge has disappeared in the last year as I've done almost all backend. My knowledge of JS is enough to get the job done but deep knowledge? How could it be - I'm constantly building products, not toying with the minute of performance optimization or creating some impressively large framework. The stuff I do is extremely lean and relies very little on language nuances. The stuff I do could be done easily in many languages - it just happened to be in JS a lot of the time.

What do you classify as deep? I feel comfortable with JS and have a vague understanding of the internals of front end frameworks, but I wouldn't consider myself to have deep knowledge of either.

It's relative to your other skills. If you were a novice at everything and intermediate at JS then that's the trunk of your T.

I could imagine it happening, if you've worked as a contractor on 12-18 month gigs per company for the last 5 years, testing things out and getting a feel for what areas you like to work in the most.

>PM's are good at figuring out the theta, and Engineers are good at the r.

I'm only familar with the options definition of theta and the reproductive strategy of r. Could you expand? Something like, PM's are good at long term (e.g. our product needs this feature, then this feature) and Engineers are good at fine detail (e.g. the feature should work like this)?

Theta is the angle, r is the radius.

Thus PMs are good at figuring out in what direction to concentrate their effort, and then the engineers make progress in that direction. That's how I interpreted it at least.

Aha, thank you! I understand that as similar to what I tried to articular.

I spent 7 years in product before making the transition to being a developer 2 years ago. I've successfully made the jump but definitely had hoped I'd be in a better position than I am now. Obviously this could be me, but I have been pretty surprised how companies/startups seems disinterested in my PM past. I think it certainly gave me a broad perspective on how to ship software customers love, and how successful teams work. It likely is still my inexperience but nonetheless no one seems to care about broad knowledge.

I don't think it's your inexperience. I have found most people don't care if you know something else well that's outside the remit of your current role. Some are actively threatened by it.

I also switched careers 10 years ago. I have found that having this broad experience has helped me to make better decisions, understand different points of view and to work with others better.

But I usually have no ability to directly apply the experience from my first career, and very few organisations would ever want or allow me to. It's a pleasure when I can, but it's rare.

I have been working for around 5 years now and haven't stuck to one programming language or framework more than 1-2 years. Not enough to an expert in any of them. Started from c#, than some web, than cpp and some Java, than some DevOps and now full time Java. Been doing Javascript along with out of interest only.

When I tell my friends how I feel about my knowledge and expertise they say I am only suffering from imposter syndrome. May be with more years I do become really good at one or two things.

I am more of a square than an I, T, or Fat I. I have vast knowledge about a lot of stuff. I am very knowledgeable about every engineering aspect of my field (video games) and can be integrated and lead any team in the stack.

Cool