It's great to have multiple talents, but people will almost always try to pigeon-hole you, as a way to simplify the world around them. You may get further by pr

It's great to have multiple talents, but people will almost always try to pigeon-hole you, as a way to simplify the world around them. You may get further by presenting yourself as 1-dimensional in different contexts, which is a shame but that's life. The real concern is that your colleague who is also a "good" programmer currently and focuses on that one task will be a able to present himself as an "expert" programmer in 10 years time (or at least as someone with considerable experience, for what it's worth) whether or not his actual skill set has improved much. There's also Economics at work: companies tend to adopt a division of labour between specialised roles as it is far more difficult to hire someone with multiple skill sets. One person with two (relevant) skills usually costs more than two people with one skill. This means that a companies' money goes much further when they hire single-skill workers and scale the company to the point where each worker has a full-time job. This rule doesn't it apply when dealing with small companies (especially startups) which may require individual employees to adopt multiple roles, perhaps informally. Nor does it apply when multi-skill workers are essential or significantly higher-performing: e.g. presenters of physics tv programmes tend to be both good physicists and good public speakers. In summary: 1) mostly 2) no, but people will pigeon-hole you anyway *) yes, you have to be - this is where multiple skills may really give you an edge.