"When the job requires very high technical skills its a dead end." That's a very highly 'mixed' situation: I hold a Ph.D. from a top research university in so

"When the job requires very high technical skills its a dead end." That's a very highly 'mixed' situation: I hold a Ph.D. from a top research university in some very technical material, with a lot of connection with computing, and have published peer reviewed original research in some topics where, thus, I am a 'world-class' expert in those topics, and I can absolutely, positively guarantee you that (1) in a 'job interview' in such a topic I will totally blow away the interview questions and (2) really know so much that the interviewer will feel 'rejected'. So, I won't get hired. Uh, we're still back 100 years ago where the person hiring insists on knowing more and won't hire anyone who doesn't know less. In particular, the person hiring wants the new person to look just like the person hiring wants, including what the hiring person does NOT know. This situation is very general: For a person with "very high technical skills", there is essentially no way to get interviewed or hired. There is no way for that person to expect someone else to understand those skills or have a job for them. The academic solution is for such a person to publish papers and, then, have others just count the papers, prizes, grants, whatever -- never try to read the papers. In business there is really just one solution: Have the person with such skills start their own business. So, there really are people with "very high technical skills", but they essentially can't be hired, that is, they are unemployable. For a hiring manager to insist that their particular list of skills, some good, some actually 'bad', are just the 'right stuff' is a mistake of the hiring manager.