The Butt Ugly Weblog

Generalists, T-shaped people and geeks

Quite often, especially in HR circles, people talk about T-shaped people. That is, people who have a wide horizontal knowledge, and a very deep knowledge in one area. Sounds good, yes? Good generalists, yet highly sought-after specialists?

But what I really feel like is that I am like one of those bead curtains from the 60s - wide horizontal knowledge and then a myriad of little spheres of knowledge hanging from threads. I just read today of a friend who was researching something for a game, and ended up in an internet rabbit hole and now knows a LOT about certain historical tidbits, yet was unable to write his game forward. And this keeps happening to me and to a lot of geeks I know. You just know many things, and you know connections between them, and you see this wonderful, colorful tapestry of knowledge and people and things, all interconnected and interweaved in countless of interesting and fascinating manners.

To me, that embodies being a geek, really. The love and passion of knowledge that goes sometimes wide, sometimes deep, sometimes both but never goes boring.