But how many of those deep specialists got there by rationally weighing pros and cons and then picking a strategy? My guess would be that for every example who

But how many of those deep specialists got there by rationally weighing pros and cons and then picking a strategy? My guess would be that for every example who got there on the curriculum drawing board, there are at least two who just happened to be in the right place at the time the technology grew, four who got infatuated with "their" technology so much they'd specialize no matter the pay relative to generalists, and eight would-be generalists who failed to keep their generalization in balance through a sequence of projects built on top of the experience of those before. GP mentioned Carmack, that outlier of outliers. He did not get there by picking one technology and burying himself deep, he did whatever was practical. At the time IrisGL begat OpenGL, Carmack was battling the limitations of EGA and CGA in the Commander Keen series and then moved on to create the 2.5D wonders that followed. But he was more than ready to retire his world class expertise in software rendering when OpenGL came into reach of PC hardware. Textbook generalist behavior.