I think if we're talking consulting, that's to say, a la carte development, yes, there's a premium on specialists, presuming the person doing the ordering knows

I think if we're talking consulting, that's to say, a la carte development, yes, there's a premium on specialists, presuming the person doing the ordering knows what they're looking for. There are domains where a lot of specialist knowledge transfers over. A kernel hacker and jump into glibc with little pain. Someone developing databases can jump into real-time systems and get up to speed pretty quickly. In those sorts of fields, if you've not cut your teeth on something pretty closely related, you're basically not worth paying for. Turning that around to the web world, if you only know Ruby on Rails, but can't do Javascript, don't know your way around an image editor and don't know a little SQL, you're less valuable. Somebody who's competent in several of those has a lot higher value. A year and a half ago I basically wrote C++. That's it. Today, since I also do our web programming, I regularly use three or four programming languages per week. But looking down the line, it's not an especially good use of my time to have me, a systems programmer, futzing around with jQuery.