T Shaped People, Pi Shaped People and Cthulhu Shaped People

Chris Phillips
2 min readJul 27, 2017

Edit: Apparently not everyone knows who Cthulhu. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu

Originally, I was told the technology industry wanted T shaped people. I.e. Someone who knew a bit of everything but was very deep technically in one thing.

This moved on to wanting Pi shaped People. I.e. Someone with two specialties but again broad across the board. This was good because you needed less people for complex specialists tasks but they had the appropriate training. However they may not be as technically deep in some areas as T shaped people.

However the more I work the more I find people have many technical specialties to different levels. Some of these over lap, sometimes they are missing the core or basic understanding but can explain the complex side. This is the modern day Cthulhu shaped person.

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Chris Phillips

Pink Teddy gets sent to help his owner's Daddy. All opinions are of Chris Phillips, IBM Master Inventor, API SME, Governance SME for IBM Cloud Services