Initially I came across this term T-Factor when I went to an interview scheduled with one of the top Multinational Companies. Before conducting the interview, one of their senior managers told all the candidates that they are looking for a candidate having strong technical knowledge as well as who are willing to learn other technologies, because the company’s target was to make the developer a T Shaped developer. After hearing that everyone was like, T Shaped Developer?? What the heck is that??. The company’s plan was to train the selected candidates in other technologies so that they can be called as a full stack developer having most of the skill set in order to develop an application end to end.
Now let’s talk about what exactly a T Shaped developer is. In the early days of the waterfall model you had the flexibility to stick to one technology, I mean there were people who had their expertise only on web technologies, some only had their strong hands on server side technologies like Java or .NET or Python and some on database skills. So the roles were well defined on who is responsible to do what.
Most of the companies have moved out of the waterfall model (Not all have moved out) and started adopting agile methodologies. And subsequently companies are looking out for candidates who can be a full stack developer. Agile teams mostly consist of 6-9 members and each member should be equally competent so that if any of the team members is on leave, the others should be capable of resuming the task whis is on halt irrespective of whatever technology he has to work upon.
So the vertical bar in the letter T says that you should have an in-depth knowledge in one technology and the horizontal bar denotes you should have expertise in a wide variety of technologies other than your primary skill and should be capable enough to start working whenever required.
In the example image above, Developer is an expert in Java and RDBMS such as Oracle and also has a good knowledge of Angular, React, Node, Mongodb & CSS3. So whenever he is given a task to modify a web page he should be comfortable to work on Angular or any of the above technologies.
Earlier a lot of us were advised to pick a language of interest or choice and master it, instead of learning 10 different languages and not being an expert in one. Say you are a Java developer and you are a die hard fan of the features that Java provides and you are more interested in the server side development. And on the other hand you totally hate UI technologies, as you find it very difficult to design web pages for some reason. But now the story is completely different. As they say, don’t be “Jack of all trades and master of none” rather be “Be Master of one”.
I hope you liked this post, if you did then don’t forget to share along with your geeky friends and colleagues.
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