The T-Shaped Engineer | Alex Kondov
The business needs engineers that can adapt to the dynamics of the modern world. Professionals that are self-sufficient and won’t go into paralysis when the DevOps is out on holiday. Ideally, any person in the team should fill any other role if needed - from small tweaks on the UI, to debugging the CI pipeline.
This is easier said than done, though. Acquiring the skills to be productive in multiple areas requires years. You also need to be exposed to different parts of the product. A company with strong silos between teams won’t give you that opportunity.
At the same time, when complex work needs to be done, a team of generalists may lack the experience to take proper decisions. When the database’s performance needs improvement or architectural decisions need to be made you need a person that’s deeply focused on that topic.
The evolution of software development methodologies required a new kind of engineers - specialised generalists.
Thus, the term “T-Shaped Specialist” was coined. It is used to describe a person whose knowledge distribution looks like the letter T. The horizontal line describes a broad working knowledge in multiple areas. The vertical one is for specialization in a topic.
A back end engineer who can put up their own interface, style it reasonably and deploy it may fall into that category. A UI engineer that can spin up an Express service when needed and can debug an API endpoint could also be considered T-Shaped.
Having a team of specialised generalists means that work can be prioritised without worrying about the available developers. This breaks the silos around teams and helps everyone to get more involved in the project.
Problems of T-Shaped Engineers
Having T-Shaped specialists is not a silver bullet. It doesn’t mean that anyone can do any job and do it well. While they have broad knowledge this doesn’t mean that they can perform exceptionally everywhere.
The business may sometimes falsely expect such engineers to be experts in everything. T-shaped engineers can adapt and get up to speed with different technologies. But they still have a main area of focus.