The same holds true for your knowledge investments. Java is the conservative choice of today. ... With your head in your monitor coding, you might not even hear about something like this until it was too late. You might find yourself on the job market with a suddenly less valuable skill.

Unfortunately, the software industry has churned out a whole lot of these shallow specialists, who use the term specialist as an excuse for knowing only one thing. In the medical industry, a specialist is someone with a deep understanding of some specific area of the field. ... I wanted someone who, when dealing with high-level abstractions, would understand the low-level details