Thoughts For The Week - 2025.08.31
T-Shaped Developers, The AI 80/20 Rule and The Electric Stack
1. The T-Shaped Developer: Do you know what you need to learn to increase your impact and take the next step in your career growth?
Graphical overviews to help senior devs think about which skills they should invest in so that they can make a bigger impact.
Essential reading for new EMs or potential Engineering Managers to think outside of pure tech skills.
Generalists are flexible but shallow. Specialists are deep but blind. Both cap their careers earlier than they expected.
T-shaped engineers combine the two. They bring depth in one area, breadth across systems, and influence that multiplies their impact. In large companies, this is the unfair advantage. It is what makes you indispensable and promotable.
Career growth is not about grinding a single stat or distributing them randomly. It is about building the T-shaped build that unlocks hidden levels and rare rewards. The path is clear: go deep, go broad, and stack your skills. That is how you create exponential growth. (Link)
2. The 80/20 Rule with AI. Take the time to do the curation.
We’re treating GenAI output like human drafts: quick scan, minor edits, done. But GenAI doesn’t make typos. It makes confident nonsense. It fills gaps with plausible fiction instead of asking for clarity. Curating AI content isn’t editing. It’s diamond grading, finding the flaws in what looks flawless.
The smart users of GenAI? They're spending 40 minutes prompting and 3 hours sculpting. Do they save time? Probably not. Do they get better quality? You bet. They produce work that makes everyone else wonder what their secret is.
3. What is the Electric Stack? How has it evolved and what does it mean for the future?
Everything we see around us, and will see around us in the future, is the result of the potential to do work (energy), the capacity to decide what to do and how (intelligence), and the ability to manipulate matter (action).
This one is a mammoth 40,000 words. But gives an intricate history of the scientific advances that brought about the Electric Stack (batteries, magnets & motors, power electronics and embedded compute) and how those improvements compound over time.
It’s a mix of the high level strategies that were behind the development of each part of the stack. How they are related and how the overall benefits have exploded over time.
This covers so much. One of the main messages that I took away is how much progress was down to sheer hard work and many many small improvements. These compound over time. Larger breakthroughs are rare and require a massive amount of persistence. Overall this leads to massive improvements.
This highlights the importance of iteration and self reflection as the cornerstone to getting these advancements. When you’re in your next retrospective, really concentrate and work on just one enhancement. Even if it’s small, it will compound over time and they all add up.
Have a great week.