I too have a broken comb profile. Every now an then I get to have some fun and add or extend a few teeth. But for the most part the skills let me work through most tangles pretty well.
Aah, I was looking for a word to describe this shape!
It's also what I consider myself. It's basically the result of being a generalist who is also willing to dive deep in order to solve a problem rather than stackoverflow my way to a workaround.
"Key-shaped" might be another word here, for someone who does have an area of focus, but not as extreme as a T shape. For example, someone who does full stack web dev with a frontend specialty, but not so focused on one particular frontend framework.
Key shaped is not a bad term, probably moot, but it doesn't quite have the aspect-ratio I was thinking of - of course it also doesn't have the word "broken" in it either...
Its interesting that a history of doing hard things is less important than it once was at interview time. You still have to prove that you can do hard things.
The problem is, while I love my story of figuring out xmlhttprequest (before it was called ajax) in IE5 so I could rebuild our refresher frame to not refresh anymore because Windows had unexpectedly introduced a clicking sound for every page navigation and our application was now clicking every second driving our customers crazy, that situation will never come up again.
Every day, the specifics of tech experience matter less, and they reduce to "merely" signals of creativity, tenacity, etc.
