Depth vs Breadth Expertise

It's usually the lack of breadth that hurts you.IT is a fast-moving field. Solving business problems takes understanding which good ways to do that are currently available, what limitations and dangers each approach brings, how would it interact with other things, etc.You still need deep knowledge, but the most efficient knowledge is that of key principles, general approaches and ideas. A specific technology does not matter much, and can be mastered quickly enough, if you already ar

It's impossible to be an expert in everything, but it's very doable to be competent in many areas. I just don't see the problem in being quite decent,for example, at Vue.js and Kafka and Postgres. Let's say you have been working with Postgres during the last year: you are very competent at it. Now, for reasons, you need to work on the client side app of your company: you don't know Vue.js, but you go and read the documentation (as any competent dev would do). You spent m

I would describe it differently; deep vs wide knowledge.I think having both skills is ideal; be able to quickly get things done, but also be able to acquire deep knowledge when necessary. T-shaped skills.In reality I think there is no clear divide. If you do the on demand thing, you'll encounter situations that require a deep dive or if you recognize the same patterns in different things. If you do new things learning is inevitable.I don't share the concerns, I think there is

This list is missing a big one: become an expert in an application domain. The rest is pretty much worthless if you don't have a grip of the application.

In general I would say expert knowledge is more valuable. However, I think of knowledge as a pyramid - how high you can go is determined by how wide/strong your foundation is.In my experience I've found that trying to develop deep expertise requires a solid understanding of many different fundamentals. For example, when I was doing NLP research, I had to learn about distributed systems in order to diagnose problems when training with multiple GPUs, or about dynamic libraries for fix

A person can only be a true expert in a few areas. I'm interested in math and data science outside of writing business code. Maybe you're an expert in those too? I don't feel like I should be dismissed because I don't have much interest in hardware.

You only hurt yourself by drawing a line between academic knowledge and work knowledge. Very few people are actual geniuses that just retain information. Rather, most people know about things because they use them every day, that's all. Professors and researchers know CS stuff because that's what they need to get a paycheck. You know K8s because that gets you a paycheck. The fact that the former is called "knowledge" and the latter a "skillset" is just a technicalit

I read that as a statement of arrogance. We are not überprogrammers able to delve down to all levels of the system.When was the last time an Excel macro developer needed to know semiconductor physics in order to debug a fault lying in the silicon layer?When has a Ruby on Rails programmer ever needed to know quantum electrodynamics to track down a hard disk error?Abstractly you may consider that knowledge to be useful, but concretely, there's a reason people specialize - each of those do

People don't have infinite time, so yes. Or you poll your knowledges together or you try to learn a lot of different thingEveryone will have any combination of different levels of knowledge for several subjectsWhat's important is people invest in what they really want to doI am a back-end developer, can I also do front-end? Sure, but I don't want to. I prefer to invest time in database and data warehouse and dabble in ML. And yet I can still only be a jack of all trades f

I think there's a bit of an "everybody knows that" [1] phenomenon when it comes to knowledge like this. Devs come from different backgrounds and work on different types of projects. There are 10000 things you expected to know to be an expert, and all of us are continually learning.[1] https://xkcd.com/1053/