All of us probably remember graph data structures, and the traversal methods (BFS and DFS). As an engineer, we can visualise the expertise and learnings in tech industry as a graph. Going forward with this assumption, should we approach this knowledge graph in a breadth-first or depth-first fashion.
Breadth is how many things you know about, whereas depth is how much you know about that thing. As far as my understanding goes, depth helps you move fast in one direction, and breadth helps you move towards the right direction. Breadth gives you diverse perspectives, and thus wisdom. And, on a long time scale, wisdom is almost always more valuable than knowledge.
Our tech industry is weird this way that a person with very deep expertise in one specific thing is praised as an expert whereas a person with broad skills is called out as a jack of all trades but master of none.
As an industry, we overvalue knowledge much more than wisdom. This primarily might be because testing knowledge is relatively very easier when compared to wisdom.
Moving fast is as important as moving in the right direction. In my view, there are two levels of optimisations to be done. Early on in career, we should be optimising for breadth. Why?
Because I feel it’s more important to understand the questions and conversations. You can always go deeper to find the answers once you understand the questions. Going broad helps us identify core concepts in the deluge of languages, frameworks, and whatnot. There are few concepts, different frameworks just make different choices at these conceptual levels on approaching different problems.
With time, as we progress in our career we need to find and zero down on few of the skills or frameworks or tools and go deep on those. This is where the optimisation moves from breadth to depth. We’ll keep hitting walls beyond which we cannot progress. It tells us that we have maxed out something about ourself and get nudged towards learning something more. Deeply familiarising ourself with the framework/tool we’re using gives us some basis which is very useful to find patterns when we go outside of that framework.
Over time, we will transition from a short, fat engineer to a T-shaped engineer who are much more sought after. There is a good amount of breadth that you need to find the right direction to move into, and the sufficient amount of depth to move fast into the direction that you have chosen.