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Jurgen Appelo's avatar

Forget T-shaped. The future is M-shaped.

As several other people have pointed out before me, the added value of humans is connecting ideas from multiple domains. It is no coincidence that many Nobel prize winners are specialists in more than one area because this allows them transfer of knowledge and insights across domains. Neither T-shaped specialists nor true generalists can easily do that, and LLMs aren't good at it either.

A random article (not mine) describing the concept:

https://medium.com/management-matters/m-shaped-engineers-the-future-of-software-f88e9c074c1a

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Peter Yang's avatar

Love the M shaped idea - we all have multiple careers in our lifetimes!

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Larry C Jenkins's avatar

Way of the future with the AI tool and Agent worldview

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Ken Marshall's avatar

dude, heck yes.

think your last one of making your work more enjoyable is a huge unlock that I dont hear talked about often enough.

you increase your chances of success by sticking with something over time.

you can make yourself stick to something through sheer grit and willpower (finite) or find a way to have fun and keep it interesting.

great article Peter, I appreciate your insights.

ps - i definitely hope nasa doesn’t let Chatgpt run their rockets. 😂

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Jacob Alchin's avatar

What would you say are the best platforms to automate tedious tasks at work? We currently use copilot at my work and I struggle with using it to automate things, do I have to set up an AI agent?

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Larry C Jenkins's avatar

Interesting — T skills talk appreciate — Pushed this concept in the AF almost a decade ago

Thanks for reminding me of the cutting edge work on Workforce development in this timeline

IBM Change Study

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