Technical Expertise

I was going through a course on software architecture and I came across an interesting concept. It’s nothing too uncommon but it’s something I haven’t paid attention to.
In the simplest terms it states that our knowledge is like a pyramid. What we know forms a small part on the top of the pyramid. What we know that we don’t know forms the next layer. But what really takes up the most chunk are stuff we don’t know that we don’t know about.

An example of this might be that I need to create an application which should run across iOS, Android and Windows phone. Given this requirement I might blindly start using a framework like ‘Xamarin’ and start implementation. What I did not know that there is another way – creating a ‘hybrid’ app using the ‘webview’ component present in all the three SDKs. While at the end of the day Xamarin might still be the better choice, based on the requirements, but now knowing that another approach exists, we missed out on an opportunity to create a simpler solution.
Also, as we grow in our careers we need to move things out of the lower triangle and at-least move it into the middle triangle, so that whenever an opportunity presents itself, we know that a way to tackle the problem already exists. This increases our ‘technical breadth’ which is more useful than ‘technical depth’ as we go higher up the technical career path.