Broad Knowledge vs Narrow Specification
As far as I see there are two ways of learning things: one is to touch upon a lot of subjects from different areas to some extend and be get more or less deep in one particular, another is to ignore a lot of stuff out there and just focus on one subject deepest possible. For instance one may be quite familiar with different programming languages like C, Java, Perl, PHP, Visual Basic and programming for different platforms, in addition know a bunch of things about system administration on different OSes and so on and so forth and be more advanced let’s say on Linux administration or whatever. Another person may not know all of those things, but be very very good in Java programming or any other field.
Until now I was more of the first type of the person where I was getting my hands on everything I could and meanwhile I was doing Linux administration (especially in MS Windows network environment) better than anything else. But recently I thought that maybe I should change the approach and just focus all my attention on one thing to get to do it perfectly well? What is the way you do things?
(On Jul 12th, 2007 at 10:43 am)
It’s kinda hard to focus on something specific, because all the time you have to witness other technologies or methods (even though they’re similar in most of the hi-tech industry), so as the result most of people end up with the first approach you’ve mentioned.
For me, I’m trying to stick with mesa-dev programming and OpenGL, but the requests for job in Cy force me to dig into Web-Design (which I really get tired of). It’s really hard to get into one thing when you’re interrupted all the time with other ones :)
(On Jul 12th, 2007 at 12:49 am)
As always, this is more a question of balance rather than anything else. If you focus hard on a single area of expertise, you’re limiting your employment possibilities, as well as your “applicability”. By becoming very “useful” in one area, you become very “useless” in many other areas. Hence, your value drops for all employers but those who can utilize you in that one area of your expertise.
On the other hand, if you focus and everything and anything that comes your way, you are becoming an expert on nothing. That’s even worse than the previous option.
The best approach, IMHO, is to choose your specific area of expertise, but choose it to be wide enough.
For example, I’m focusing mostly on Linux system administration. I know a little bit about other areas too (web design and development, networking, databases, programming in several languages, office automation, accounting, etc), but those aren’t my primary areas of interest. Administration of Linux systems is. If there is anything I need to know to make my Linux systems perform better, I’ll learn it. Often, this knowledge will be also applicable to other areas too (Perl programming for instance).