
The Case for Platypodes - purplequark
http://purplequark.com/the-case-for-platypodes.html
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philrz
As someone who identifies with this "platypode" label, I'm happy to see some
dialogue about it. The label is certainly an improvement vs. "jack-of-all-
trades", which often came with the implicit/negative "master-of-none".

I'm blessed that I've been able to settle at multiple companies where I could
ultimately flourish platypus-style. My peers/supervisors were always quite
satisfied, sometimes describing me in hindsight as a "secret weapon". Alas, it
was not always easy getting to that point. I haven't found a way to
successfully get into such a role other than to exploit close personal
networks of people who have seen my skills play out as described in the
article and can testify to peers and hiring managers that it's for real. Even
then, it seems there's still a challenge when justifying to a Board of
Directors or CEO, since they sign off on hiring plans: "In Q1, we have reqs
for a QA person and a Product Marketeer". That fits nicely onto a PowerPoint
slide and easy to check off when it's been done successfully. It's much
tougher to imagine pitching "We're going to open a req for a platypus who will
bootstrap our IT, handle Agile coaching, do some performance testing to select
a back-end database, start some competitive research, and cut our first
product videos", even though that's precisely what I did at my last job.
Thankfully, since I was working with people who knew me, they got me in the
door with a narrow title, then permitted me to start doing all the other
stuff. I doubt I'd have been able to sell that approach to strangers, though
I'd love to hear testimony of anyone else who may have pulled it off.

~~~
purplequark
I worked with Phil at Jut (and wrote the post), and remember him being
referenced fairly frequently in my job interviews. ("You know, you remind me
of Phil, though much less talented and without the ruggedly handsome bit.") To
my count, he setup the wireless and wired infrastructure, ran the post-sprint
meetings, setup some DevOps sandboxes for application testing, helped
troubleshoot customer installs, coded, wrote tons of internal docs on the
wiki, helped onboard confused new hires, and set up the MAME arcade machine.
I'm certainly missing a ton. I'm not sure what his title was (Technical
Director?), but he was basically the first person to go to when you didn't
know who to go to.

