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Comment by signaru | Hacker News Reader

T-shaped is good, but preferably skills are organically acquired. In my previous work, the T-shaped mantra has been naively pushed and used as an excuse to put employees on all sorts of disjoint activities and trainings that took time away from the main deliverables. This caused people to leave. I instead prefer "JIT learning".

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JIT learning is a great skill to have but if it's all you do, it becomes unrewarding over long periods of time. There's something very satisfying about executing stuff that you know how to do well, and you're missing out on time spent in a flow state if you're constantly JIT learning. The quality of your work is lower when JIT learning too. Of course if you only do stuff you know well, you stagnate and get bored, so you need to balance it out.

I like to do JIT on a prototypes and then use the knowledge to fall into flow state when working on the real product. Once that gets boring time for a new prototypes

I feel the same. It's also just very mentally taxing to learn on the fly. Because usually, I'm trying to develop a feature and I feel the pressure of delivering on time. I find it difficult to learn even on the best days, and if I'm stressed, it makes it much harder to concentrate.

JIT is great if the things happen to interest you. JIT suuuuuucks if you don't like what you're learning and someone is always telling you what to learn.

But even the first situation can fail if you are under constant pressure and deadlines with no breathing room because it sours the enjoyment of learning.

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