Yes. I did, and do this. I started life as a marketer/sales guy. I also find it to be very rare among my colleagues. In fact, I haven't met anyone else in the

Yes. I did, and do this. I started life as a marketer/sales guy. I also find it to be very rare among my colleagues. In fact, I haven't met anyone else in the same positions I have held in any of the industries that I've been in that can or do code. I'm biased but I think that heavily specialized professionals are not what is needed right now. I've heavily focussed on Marketing/Sales/Tech and skills from each discipline have aided me many times. I can't imagine how much more difficult it would be if I were only focused on marketing, or only sales, or only programming. Want to talk about product differentiation or potential markets? Let's do it. Want to go to see a potential customer? Awesome, fill me in on who they are and what their problems are. Want to talk about how bad my code is? Excellent, help me make it better (HNers make me feel like a script-kiddie). Master of none? Possibly. Get shit done? Definitely. I hope we start to see more people going cross-discipline and using the skills they've learned in their careers and not abandoning the skillets as it's not 'normal'. Specialized individuals seem to me like it fits better with a large organization culture and the world seems to be moving away from that now (I'm definitely heavily biased here so my thoughts could be far from reality). To answer the question of what do I do to make myself more productive - I actually usually focus on entire systems that drive me nuts rather than small optimizations for my own benefit (Much to the dismay of my colleagues as I don't care for finding keyboard shortcuts - they constantly laugh at me for not knowing that command+alt+shift+F3+F5 will open a new tab with the contents from the last page I had opened). The most recent example is a Rails app I built to track documents (Stored on S3) associated with machines in production (Things like build orders, quotes, shipping docs, etc.) because it was driving me crazy that a dozen people wasted a couple hours every day calling around to find the right documents. Now they just go to the site and I haven't heard a request since. It takes them moments. They want to expand it into other things now like tracking details of service calls handled by our reps around the world. With Rails in my tool belt it's very easy for me to get something up quickly that can be used at a fraction of the cost that it would for an external system. Coding it properly and keeping it simple also makes it scalable. In the long run it will probably die like all other software but the cost of implementing it now (in both terms of my time and company dollars) weighed against the benefits it delivers makes it a no-brainer.