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Deep Skills
The ability to drill down into the minute details and still understand how they impact the whole is, in my estimation, one of the greatest skills that an engineer can have regardless of engineering specialty.
This post was originally published at https://www.peterfraedrich.com/deep-skills/
With a single blog post, Netflix showed the world that they have probably the best engineering team on the planet. And I don’t think it’s even close right now. What they showed was an engineering team that is perfectly capable of operating at the usual layers of abstraction — cloud provider, instances, services, etc. — but still fully capable and competent enough to dive deep into the intersection of software and hardware, reason about how they interact, and find ways to improve performance at a very deep, very obtuse level. The ability to drill down into the minute details and still understand how they impact the whole is, in my estimation, one of the greatest skills that an engineer can have regardless of engineering specialty. And not only does Netflix’ tale of macro-to-micro engineering make for a compelling read it validates something I have been saying for a long time now: fundamentals matter.
