Going deep means becoming an expert. This can simply be a manifestation of doing something very well: learning about what you're doing, instead of just trying to get it off your plate as fast as possible.
One person who worked for me coded up some trade feeds for regulatory purposes. As she went along, she spent the time to learn a lot of fine-grained details about the regulations and what that meant for our system. Eventually, every meeting involving coding changes (because the regulations regularly change or have exceptions) required her presence.
Another guy wrote a feed to send some data to a central database for management reporting. The feed required some calculation pre-processing, but otherwise, it was pretty straightforward. In doing his work, he came to fully understand the nuances of the calculation on our side and how any changes would affect the aggregation. Eventually, he learned so much about this overall business process that he stopped working for me and started working for the business side.
By going deep, you become the go-to person on a subject. You can go deep on a technical language or a complex application module. You become the state of the art for that art. You demonstrate high competence in a public, understood way.
Going wide means picking up new skills or knowledge. The key to going wide is that the value is unlocked only when you combine the new with the old.
My friends who worked on the trade and data feeds combined their programming skills with a business process they previously knew nothing about. They did an excellent job of combining the two.
What you can't do is learn something totally unrelated to what you are doing now. Eventually, this could pay off for you, but it could be a long wait, and it won't help you excel today. You are a newbie in the new field; your only advantage is your accumulated unique experience that you bring with you.
Here's a fascinating example of a guy who repeatedly goes deep, then jumps to something new but related, then goes deep in that. He started with industrial engineering, becomes an expert in gun manufacturing ("I probably know as much, or more, as any one single person about manufacturing guns," he claims, credibly), moves into robotics. Then,
A few months ago, Baber decided to design his own mini-helicopter, one light enough to disassemble and carry in a backpack. After a successful test flight in January, he is currently busy building [modifications].
Yes, these are all related fields for him. This example shows that, if you truly master this process, you actually create your own "industry". Here's the summary (and the full article, requires free registration).
No comments:
Post a Comment