T shaped individual

I receive a lot of questions on how to master multiple programming languages, what to prefer, in which order to start, etc. While these questions make perfect sense, it is important to determine the motive behind these questions. Learning a lot of programming languages is a must-have these days. The question is at what stage?

I have seen and met individuals who start working on a language, work for few days, hop on to the next bandwagon. One of the reasons behind such behavior is FOMO. Many see colleagues, Friends, or the buzz words on social media and jump on the bandwagon to work on something which is the talk of the town.

A person may have worked on a lot of languages in a short span of time, but that does not necessarily translate into expertise. It is like being

Jack of all trades and master of none.

So who is a T shaped Person

A T-shaped skilled person is someone who has command over at least one of the programming languages. Additionally, they have another broad set of skills that complement their primary skills.

A person is called an expert if they carry in-depth knowledge in what they work on, and a person is called a generalist if they know a lot of stuff, but are not an expert or have a niche in anything they work on. The target should be to become a combination of both.

Advantage of being a T shaped person

• You would have an area of expertise, hence you can complete a task related to it much faster.
• You can engage with in-depth discussion, resolve technical queries and remove bottlenecks for yourself as well as help others.
• There is a huge demand of such people who have multiple skillsets but are also an expert in something.
• You can engage with people from another skill set as you are aware of the topics and can use this as an opportunity to learn more about it.

How to become a T shaped person

While the answer to this question would vary from person to person, but a common theme is to identify what is it that you want to do.

• List down all your current skills
• Provide ratings to yourself on a scale of 5, 1 being the lowest.
• Identify your strength (having highest rank), if it is the one that you want to be an expert at. You are already halfway.
• Build on the knowledge, read blogs, create side projects, engage with others. There is no dearth of resources to learn these days, practise and work towards achieving expertise.
• Add on the skillset which you want to learn additionally.