The Tumbling E Developer - Or a Grown Up T-Shaped Developer
July 1, 2025Tags: careers
I’m in a Discord with a lot of friends that I’ve known for almost 20 years now. We’re techies of all sorts. Some are job hunting, so we’re talking about our careers, what we’ve done, and where we want to go.
In my post Why Engineers Need More Than One Road, I mentioned the T-shaped developer. I also mentioned that I’m not really one of those.
The Grown Up T-Shaped Developer
Earlier in my career, I would have been seen as T-shaped developer. The horizontal part of the T is the breadth - seen in my wearing of many hats early on. The vertical part of the T could be seen in the scripting knowledge I had - between Perl scripting, bash scripts, and PowerShell scripts, I did a lot of scripting early on. In 2011, I co-authored a book on PowerShell - so calling the vertical part of my T at that point as scripting isn’t off brand.
That was in 2011 - 14 years ago! I’ve evolved a lot more in that time. I’ve gotten into tech education as well as software architecture. I am finding myself running out of room on the T. I keep wanting to dive into other topics - auth(N/Z), user experience, data scaling… these are just a few of the areas I’ve gone further in.
The Tumbling E Developer
While chatting with my friends, I mentioned this:
While there’s a concept called a “T-shaped” developer, I don’t fit that either - but that might be because decades in the field lead to multiple depth points. So I’m more of the sideways E that used to be on the eye charts. - Sadukie
This got me thinking - what is that really called? “Sideways E” doesn’t feel like it’s the right term. So I did some searching and found it - the Tumbling E chart!
The Tumbling E chart is used for vision testing with young children who don’t know the letters of the alphabet. Rather than identifying letters, you identify the direction the “E” is pointing. This is how I think of how the T-shaped developer evolves:
What does that look like for me?
Running Out of Legs - Extended Tumbling E?
Thinking of where I am in my career, I’ve already run out of legs on my tumbling E. The thing is, I’ve been here full-time 23 years plus about 2.5 years of part-time or student work all in tech.
When you look at my conference talks over the past 15+ years, you probably see topics related to this extended tumbling E:
There are a lot of things I’ve been doing for a very long time that get into the depths. And this is just where I’m at today - if I keep continuing my career in tech, there will most likely be more extending of the tumbling E, more depths.
Conclusion
Am I a generalist? Yes. Do I have specialties? Yes. So am I a T-shaped developer? I’ve grown beyond the T, and I hope to continue mentoring folks who are also growing beyond the T.
Know that even when you outgrow the label, there’s more learning and career adventures ahead!