You might look into the Lotka curve, the ‘o-ring model’, or Shockley’s analysis of productivity as a lognormal phenomenon: “On the Statistics of the Individual Variations of Productivity in a Research Laboratory”. The ‘adjacency’ of skills clearly must break down at some point, otherwise specialization & division-of-labor wouldn’t be so useful, and there are probably a lot of other things like hard thresholds for skills to be worthwhile, but probably many people aren’t at the optimal balances of skills/traits—I think yak shaving may be a particularly strong symptom of when certain skills or tools have been underinvested in.
You might look into the Lotka curve, the ‘o-ring model’, or Shockley’s analysis of productivity as a lognormal phenomenon: “On the Statistics of the Individual Variations of Productivity in a Research Laboratory”. The ‘adjacency’ of skills clearly must break down at some point, otherwise specialization & division-of-labor wouldn’t be so useful, and there are probably a lot of other things like hard thresholds for skills to be worthwhile, but probably many people aren’t at the optimal balances of skills/traits—I think yak shaving may be a particularly strong symptom of when certain skills or tools have been underinvested in.