Depth vs Breadth

Vladimir Iglovikov

Sr. Software Engineer at Lyft, Level5

Ph.D. in Physics

Kaggle Grandmaster

Glass ceiling

  • You work harder than everyone else.
  • You train State Of The Art models.
  • You publish papers at top conferences.

Most likely (90% chance) you will never get to L6!

Skill tree. In theory.

Scikit learn

xgboost

PyTorch

AWS

python

Go

Kubernetes

docker

Skill tree. In practice.

Ownership

Technical

Communication

Your level

Not your level

Want to advance your career?

You can not be a specialist.

You need to become T-shape!

Why companies are interested in

T-shape labor?

  1. Easy to toss between projects.
  2. Decreased "bus factor".
  3. Less people to do the job.

Why becoming

T-shape?

  1. Can lead large scale projects.
  2. Less biased point of view.
  3. Broader job market.
  4. You work with many interesting people. 

Going wide is painful

  • Imposter syndrome.
  • Multitasking.
  • Not all things that you need to learn are interesting.
  • Work with numerous people. Many of them feel like idiots.
  • Feel that you are losing your deep knowledge.
  • Feel that you are wasting your life.

What if not go wide?

Academia

Middle in industry

Instead of a conclusion

You need to add width to your depth. => T-shape

 

You need to find time for deep work.

Depth vs bredth

By Vladimir Iglovikov

Depth vs bredth

  • 1,258