Deep Contribution and Wide Contribution

Source: Dev.to

Summary

• Deep contribution refers to project work.
• Wide contribution refers to transject work.

In today’s world, there is a supremacy of deep contribution, which tends to lead to a shortage of talent because it requires a high level of human resources. To mitigate this, it is beneficial to shift to a paradigm of wide contribution.

Background

The Reality that Work ≒ Project Work and Role ≒ Framework

A shortage of human resources is being reported in almost all organizations, largely because there is little flexibility in how “work” is perceived.

Work is often equated with project work:

• Members need a comprehensive ability to adapt to projects and teams.
• Without this, individuals are not considered valuable assets, even if they are skilled.

Roles are treated as a framework model:

• A framework is created in advance, and people who fit into this framework are sought.
• Job descriptions vary widely, but they merely change the material or color of the framework, while the “framework” of position or role names remains static.

In short, only those who have comprehensive abilities and fit the framework can pass through, making such individuals hard to find.

Engineers Are No Exception

Engineers face the same issue. Managers and senior engineers, who are responsible for human‑resource management and acquisition, also struggle to find talent with the required comprehensive abilities. Consequently, they must focus on long‑term talent nurturing, which involves significant communication costs—almost like teaching. They often justify this effort with notions such as “it’s necessary” or “nurturing can be enjoyable,” but it remains a challenging endeavor.

It’s Time to Change the Paradigm

The culture described above is what I call the approach of Deep Contribution. Projects fall precisely into this category: one dives into a specific scope and strives to achieve the intended outcomes, doing whatever it takes until success is achieved.

Relying solely on this approach has limitations. It is time to introduce another, fresher paradigm.

Deep Contribution and Wide Contribution

• Deep Contribution refers to project work. As the name suggests, it involves diving deeply within a specific scope and working tirelessly until the desired outcome is achieved. If not initially possible, it means persevering until it becomes possible, going deeper and deeper.

• Wide Contribution refers to non‑project, cross‑support roles. You do not belong to any particular project and work on a best‑effort basis, but in return, the influence range is vast. For example, an individual engineer (not in an executive position) regularly delivers blog posts to several thousand employees within the company and responds to queries from all employees.

Comparison by value

• Deep contribution delivers a value of 100 to a single project.
• Wide contribution provides a value of 1 to 100 projects.

Examples of Wide Contribution

Wide contributions have a name: Transject. I have already written an article with specific examples—please take a look:

👉️ Project vs Transject - DEV Community

Wide Contribution Alleviates Human Resource Shortage

Focusing solely on deep contribution (project supremacy) is akin to monolithic code: hastily written, prioritizing speed over cleanliness, resulting in unsightly, hard‑to‑maintain code with unbearable technical debt. It requires overall excellent talent to withstand this mess.

When wide contribution is recognized and wide contributors increase, organizations benefit from:

• Intentional review of existing work and structures, verbalizing, modeling, and determining what to extract and restructure—similar to turning common data into variables or modularizing processes into functions.
• Development, organization, and delivery of ideas and methods that become convenient when understood and adopted—comparable to introducing linters, formatters, or type systems.

While this may require more effort in the short term, it leads to better structuring in the mid to long term. As engineers, you surely understand the advantage of structured systems.