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?
- Easy to toss between projects.
- Decreased "bus factor".
- Less people to do the job.
Why becoming
T-shape?
- Can lead large scale projects.
- Less biased point of view.
- Broader job market.
- 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.
