You can get trapped by a specialty, but there are ways to get out of that. Open source opens up a lot of doors there. For two of my three post-college jobs I

You can get trapped by a specialty, but there are ways to get out of that. Open source opens up a lot of doors there. For two of my three post-college jobs I had no professional experience in the area that I was going into, but had a decent body of open source work (on projects that were being used already by my future employers) that established that I was a credible specialist. If you're unemployed and looking for a job, it's not a huge gamble to roll the dice and try to learn a lot about an area you're interested in. Just do so realizing that you may have to repeat that process again at some point. As a side-note, just because a specialization is seemingly on the way out doesn't mean that it's not lucrative. I remember when in college, in 1999, I was probably one of the youngest people in the world that knew COBOL. The offers that I was getting at the ripe age of 19 were $200k+ because everyone was terrified of Y2K stuff. Since then I've mostly worked as a C++ developer. While there's less new software being written in C++ today relative to a decade ago, it's still a very marketable skill precisely because the number of people that are good at it is smaller than the number of jobs available.