I work at a ~50 employee company (UK), where all the technical people do a bit of everything. Specialising in anything for very long (6 months) is discouraged. For example, last week, I built a new Debian webserver, refactored some Perl, sat on a sales phone call, did a tape backup, reviewed code, built and deployed an RPM, gave opinions about x, y, z... With such a work scheme, I have gained a general knowledge how many things work, and pretty specific knowledge. I maybe program for 5 hours a week, despite officially being a developer. Does anyone else work like this, (or is this company unique)? Is it a problem to have skills developed in this way? (i.e. know a bit about everything in a certain domain, rather than know everything about say, one programming language?) Is it okay to be a generalist?