My Nerd Hero: Alton Brown

Alton Brown brought nerdy, in-depth food facts to kitchen around the around for thirteen years, combining Bill Nye's sense for showmanship with culinary topics.

Throughout the show, Brown exposed the virtues of supplying your kitchen with "Multi-taskers," rather than single-use appliances. His reasoning, if I remember correctly, is that due to limited budgets, storage space (etc…), every piece of equipment needs to do a few different jobs. There's simply not room or money for a bevy of single-use tools in a household kitchen!

The same can be said for a engineering team.

What's a Multi-tasker?

In software development, multi-taskers are the people who can do it all. Perhaps the have an interest in UX design, enjoy fumbling around in PHP and spend their free time doing coding gymnastics with the latest Javascript framework.

Multi-taskers hop freely from one language to another because they're not married to one technology stack. They (likely) haven't spent decades learning the ins and outs of a particular platform. they don't need to be convinced to at least try a potential solution.

They are curious about the world and how to put their stamp on it. They experiment with new things, they ask questions, they fail. They are not afraid to look ridiculous or make something useless. They have fun.

They're interested in solving problems.

Unbound by the skills that they currently possess, multi-taskers leap into the unknown and let the problem be their roadmap.

Fostering Creativity

A good "Multi-tasker" will help your team foster creativity, experimentation and collaboration. Your team can harness this optimism to explore new opportunities.

Limited Expertise

Jack of all trades, master of none. It's good to have a range of limited expertise on a team. That way, someone can take the lead on any given problem that needs solving.

Some team members have a specific area of expertise, but that doesn't limit their ability to help in other areas.

Both Leaders & Followers

Piggy-backing on this idea of limited expertise, everyone needs to be comfortable both leading and following. No divas. True team players know when they can take the lead and have no problem stepping back when it's in the best interest of the project.

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