Managing broad people
I wrote 3/4th of this blogpost and then realised I'd written a version of this back in 2009!
Earlier this week I spoke to someone who I can describe as a “broad” person (not in the physical sense). He has various uncorrelated interests, and if Scott Adams’s theory has to hold, this person has a high likelihood of being successful.
I was thinking of what it would be like to employ this person, and then at this stage (early conversation), it seemed like this person could be a “straight yes”.
At the time of recruitment, broad people are great (or so I think), in that if they don’t work out very well for one thing that you hire them for, they will do well in something else, given their wide variety of skills and interests.
However, once you start a job in a normal corporate environment, this tolerance for breadth goes away. Soon, people start forgetting why they hired you (“If A doesn’t happen, this person can do B, and C, and D as well”), and instead they will pigeon hole you into one job (that you possibly started doing).
Now, you are suddenly at a disadvantage - by evaluating you at your skill in this particular job (and not the entire portfolio you bring along), people are not looking at the full picture. Instead, they are looking at one component of you, and comparing that with the whole of someone else who happens to specialise in that one thing.
You are found inadequate and the pressure starts being piled on. That there were other things you could do don’t matter any more. The intersection of things you could do don’t matter any more.
Postscript 1
Thinking about this, I’ve written about this once before. I was far more geeky then:
So it’s something like this – you take your skills vector and project it on to the job requirement vector – your total skills will get multiplied now by the value of cos theta, where theta is the angle in the hyperspace between your skills vector and the job vector. For the projection of your skills on the requirement, you get paid in full. For the skills that you have that are orthogonal to the requirement, you get paid only in option value.
Postscript 2
Maybe this is why nowadays pure breadth is de-emphasized and people talk about being “T shaped”, where there is one in-demand skill where you have a high Cos Theta.
Postscript 3
In a lot of cases, broad people can get penalised at the hiring stage itself, since interviewers are looking to evaluate them against some well defined ideals or principles, and on no axis will these candidates be great, as long as they are evaluated on that axis alone.
One more reason why you have fewer “broad” people around.
Great insight.
Adam Smith famously argued that prosperity stems primarily from the division of labor. In his iconic pin factory example, ten specialized workers could produce 48,000 pins daily, averaging 4,800 pins per worker. Without specialization, an individual worker would struggle to produce even one pin per day.
Smith’s model, though, assumes ideal market conditions, large firms, economies of scale, and optimal management etc., where specialists benefit from bigger markets and higher rewards.
However, generalists thrive in early-stage startups, where versatility and adaptability are critical, and specialization can limit flexibility. As a company scales, generalists typically lose value compared to specialists.
A good rule of thumb: If you're a generalist unable to market yourself as a specialist, consider starting your own thing, don't be labour.
The performance after hiring depends on the nature of the company. In a start up environment, where you are expected to have multiple responsibilities, the person may succeed. But in big corporates, where you are siloed in a small functions, such people may not succeed.