<story><title>Short fat engineers are undervalued</title><url>https://nested.substack.com/p/short-fat-engineers-are-undervalued</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nullspace</author><text>In my career, I have met exactly one short fat engineer with &amp;gt;5yrs of exp that I was impressed by. That person is now a Product Manager at a FAANG company (albeit PM-ing highly technical stuff).&lt;p&gt;I bring this up because I think there is a very good analogy to the point that the author is making and the distinction between PM and Engineers. Broadly put, PM&amp;#x27;s are good at figuring out the theta, and Engineers are good at the r.&lt;p&gt;I think that with the perspectives that short fat engineers have, they can play enormous roles as &amp;quot;PM&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Engineering Manager&amp;quot;, and definitely as ICs during early stages of startups. But they clearly don&amp;#x27;t enjoy depth, and this can be counter-productive for that 1% of the time where you really, really want depth.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t buy the knowledge vs wisdom thing though, there&amp;#x27;s plenty of wisdom to be gained from going deep into a subject. I&amp;#x27;d actually claim that wisdom can only come from depth - though what depth means is different for different roles.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TameAntelope</author><text>If you&amp;#x27;re a &amp;quot;short and fat&amp;quot; engineer, and you know it, it&amp;#x27;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).&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Short and fat&amp;quot; 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.</text></comment>
<story><title>Short fat engineers are undervalued</title><url>https://nested.substack.com/p/short-fat-engineers-are-undervalued</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nullspace</author><text>In my career, I have met exactly one short fat engineer with &amp;gt;5yrs of exp that I was impressed by. That person is now a Product Manager at a FAANG company (albeit PM-ing highly technical stuff).&lt;p&gt;I bring this up because I think there is a very good analogy to the point that the author is making and the distinction between PM and Engineers. Broadly put, PM&amp;#x27;s are good at figuring out the theta, and Engineers are good at the r.&lt;p&gt;I think that with the perspectives that short fat engineers have, they can play enormous roles as &amp;quot;PM&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Engineering Manager&amp;quot;, and definitely as ICs during early stages of startups. But they clearly don&amp;#x27;t enjoy depth, and this can be counter-productive for that 1% of the time where you really, really want depth.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t buy the knowledge vs wisdom thing though, there&amp;#x27;s plenty of wisdom to be gained from going deep into a subject. I&amp;#x27;d actually claim that wisdom can only come from depth - though what depth means is different for different roles.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>treis</author><text>&amp;gt;met exactly one short fat engineer with &amp;gt;5yrs of exp that I was impressed by&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll go so far as to say that they don&amp;#x27;t really exist.  I&amp;#x27;m not sure how you can spend 5 years and not learn at least one thing in depth.  You&amp;#x27;d have to rotate technologies every 6-12 months and there&amp;#x27;s not that many technologies.</text></comment>