For me "back in the day" was around 2003, but given that my country is "ten years behind the rest of the world" I guess that your was earlier? And I agree with

For me "back in the day" was around 2003, but given that my country is "ten years behind the rest of the world" I guess that your was earlier? And I agree with you. Entering web development I had to know about: OS administration, DB managing, backend development (it was PHP then), front-end development (JS but with good knowledge of HTML/CSS), and on the top of it I had to know Photoshop basics and sometimes talk with client and users. But... I can tell you now that I landed a decent job - that was HELL. I would never, ever go back to how it was then. You know, it's easy to know basics of DBA, but to be good at it? It's years of experience. The same for PHP and JS, even CSS is quite a huge and complicated beast - and I won't say a thing about Photoshop, because I still wake up in the middle of the night, scared to death, because of it. I had to become good with all these technologies at once, and that meant compressing years and years and years of learning and experience into a week. Or maybe a year, but it still was too much. At the end of it - two years down the road - I was burnt out and uncertain if I want to work with computers anymore. I now do almost the same, but without clients and users and with only two or three areas I want to be good at, leaving the rest to the teammates. It's ok now and I sometimes wonder what the hell I was thinking years ago. I probably was just young and stupid. The funnies thing is that whatever I learned then I already forgot and whatever I still remember is now outdated and not useful at all. Was I just wasting my time, trying to be a "Renaissance Man"? I'm still not sure, but many things seem to suggest that.