I have been trying to tell my students for decades that multi-disciplinary 
teams are essential and that the lack of them is what significantly harms 
software development. Multi-specialization teams, e.g. analysts, programmers, 
testers, etc. are not multi-disciplinary. 

In the world of software, you can find this notion in the writings of 
Constantine and Lockwood, 70s and 80s, Naur, 80s, Kay 90s, Beck 2000, and more.

Moreover, to be an effective part of such teams each individual on the team 
needs to be a "polymath." The business press and the design community have been 
writing about this for decades. The design community actually does it, but 
business is more lip service than actuality.

Buzzwords used: "T-shaped" individuals (breadth and depth), followed by 
"pi-shaped" (two depth, one breadth), followed by "broken comb" (multiple 
depths to various degrees with thick integrated breadth), followed by "modern 
polymath." The whole "learning organization" fad of the 1990s is also grounded 
in similar ideas.

Acquiring this breadth and depth of knowledge via the current educational 
system - semesters/quarters, N-credit courses, etc. is effectively impossible. 
Not to mention the disdain that every discipline has for every other 
discipline, such that if you really do get a degree that is inter- or 
multi-disciplinary, you are pretty much guaranteed you will never get a 
professor's job in any of the component disciplines, despite most universities 
erecting a liberal arts facade.

davew


On Sat, Jan 18, 2020, at 5:52 PM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
> So, as if it weren't already hard enough to figure out what to learn to do, 
> where to do the learning, and where to go to practice it, here comes the need 
> to maximize your value according to the abilities of your potential 
> co-workers.
> 
> https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/12/eaax3370
> 
> via hackernews
> 
> -- rec --
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