[vicbrooker]

It's great when companies find someone who solves their exact problem, it sucks when you're the guy who can only solve one problem though.

Especially when someone finds a way to automate a solution.

I think Valve described the 'T' employee: know one area very deeply and a broad range of others reasonably well. Seems to be a good approach :)

Maybe another way of looking at what your friend said is to just be specific about your skills/experience when job seeking?

[icebraining]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills

[majc2]

> Especially when someone finds a way to automate a solution.

But in our industry, what is been automated away? The only things I can think of are that if you were an expert, you'd be very well placed to leverage that automation.

[im3w1l]

How about diversifying then? Not in the sense of knowing everything shallowly. But in the sense of knowing like 5 things very deeply.

[vicbrooker]

Icebraining's wiki link below hits it on the head, but my view is that knowing too much stuff deeply might make it hard to collaborate in teams as it makes roles really hard to define.

Happens in soccer a lot - teams with really versatile players will usually get whipped by teams who have specialists in each position. Top teams aim for squads with 2 players for every position, not 2 positions for every player.

Hope that makes sense, it's getting late here :)