[syshum]

I both agree and disagree with your post... Mainly because it just a big long False dilemma where you put General knowledge over specific knowledge believing that one has to choose

I think people should have a good conceptual knowledge, a base line of general knowledge of technology, that however does not preclude one from gaining vendor specific knowledge.

Your coming at this from a development standpoint, I am coming from ops but if I have legacy environment critical to my business I need people that are experts in that environment. You may have all the best "general theory" around how Virtual Machines work, how iscsi works, etc but if I have an error on VMWare ESXI that causes production lose I need a person that has DEEP understanding of VMWare not someone that understand the theory of things as I do not have time for you to open a ticket to get vendor support, I need it fixed now not 5 hours from now after vmware blames the storage vendor and the storage vendor blames vmware