> The trouble is the demand for deep technical knowledge tends to be quite fickle, you only need the market to move slightly and your narrow specialism is compl

> The trouble is the demand for deep technical knowledge tends to be quite fickle, you only need the market to move slightly and your narrow specialism is completely redundant. Domain knowledge seems to be longer lived. I don't think the specialization _delirium was talking about is usually that narrow. I happen to be a long-time contributor to postgres, _delirium's example. While I obviously don't need ramp up time while changing jobs where I only work on postgres, it's not hard to find other jobs that share significant amount of knowledge. Even if postgres were to die, I sure hope not, there's plenty of other data stores which share a good chunk of the techniques. I know other people that were deep into one OS kernel, and changed into another one, and the technical background isn't the big issue, it's the difference in social processes.