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Comment by dangwu | Hacker News Reader

The point that "on a long enough time line, wisdom is always more valuable than knowledge" is pretty irrelevant to tech companies. They hire engineers to get stuff done quickly - not slowly gather "wisdom". The average tenure at a tech company continues to be a few years. Also, I've noticed that entry-to-mid level jobs are great for "short and fat" engineers, but once you start aiming for senior (or higher) level IC positions, job interviews require you to be an expert in whatever field the position you’re interviewing for is in. If you stay "short and fat", you're setting your career trajectory up for failure.

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I tend to see a lot of highly promoted "short and fat" principal engineers and other internal thought leaders who lack depth. In fact the career path seems to top out if you prefer being an expert in something rather than jack of all trades and able to talk about any subject.

I suspect they don't lack depth so much as have depth in other technologies which aren't used. If they don't want to stay on the treadmill of building expertise in the next new thing, then they move up to jobs based on the wisdom they have accumulated instead.

I have also seen a lot of people hired in at high pay due to their laser-like career focus and years of experience in just the right area, who turned out to embody the peter principle. They lacked the brains and creativity to do anything new and still get stuck when a new twist comes up. Meanwhile I know generalists who are great at figuring things out, and got bored when they had more or less mastered the technology so them move on to a new challenge.

> If you stay "short and fat", you're setting your career trajectory up for failure.

Is staying short and fat really an option? Aren't you always specialising in the problem domain / tech stack that you're currently working with?

Not if you keep switching teams or companies every few years into something new.

Gotta laugh at the HN definition of "failure". Plenty of "short and fat" jobs provide a good career. Not everyone wants or needs anything else.

Gotta laugh at your definition of "good career". Plenty of "short and fat" jobs provide relatively failed career. Not everyone wants or needs anything else.

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