Why We Hire T-Shaped Engineers

The single piece of advice I can give about hiring amazing engineers is that you should hire for their strong suit, not just because they are full-stack engineers.

Hiring full-stack engineers seem like a "best of both worlds" scenario, but from my experience, it's the T-Shaped engineers that drive the biggest impact.



T-shaped engineers are experts who have deep experience in a single skill while being capable of understanding related subjects.

For example, full-stack developers are a great asset, but what we're really looking for is someone who specializes in the front- or back-end, and if they can also handle the other side, that's a huge bonus.

Now, I’m not saying I-shaped or generalist candidates aren’t good at what they do, but I’ve seen our t-shaped engineers perform in great ways.

September 22, 2021
Rob Volk
Rob Volk

Rob Volk is Foxbox Digital’s founder and CEO. Prior to starting Foxbox, Rob helped Fortune 500 clients, including Pfizer, USPS, and Morgan Stanley build and scale enterprise apps. He was the CTO of Beyond Diet and implemented technology that scaled to over 350k+ customers, and was the CTO and Co-Founder of Detective (detective.io), a venture-backed intelligence platform that amassed 200k+ users in a short time frame. Read more

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