Undertoad,
I can attest to you working very hard and practically running businesses for people. I really can. Even though I haven't worked with you in over a decade, I have heard your name, and it's always been in good terms. I have never heard anything bad about you. Yes, I do hear a lot about "unemployables" that manage to keep jobs in this area, and other "unemployables" that are working security. Not information security, but store security as in loss prevention.
I have not heard a bad thing about you at ALL. Considering how many former co-workers I have had and have probably pissed off to no end (I'm admittedly not the easiest person to work with), that's a major accomplishment in my book
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I'm working in the consulting racket now, however it's a killer. To stay working and in demand with my customers, I sacrifice a lot every day. I also work late at night a lot more than I'd like to doing data conversion and performance tuning.
The managers I work for are notoriously tough and are proud of it. I've worked with them on HR hires. Upper management at my customer sites focuses hires initially on either band-aid solutions to problems, immediate fixes for really big problems, or extremely in-depth knowledge of a certain area. The latter are brought in to fight the fires that come up when systems fail.
The generalists I do work with are either in the Information Security or Microsoft/UNIX/Oracle system administration/interoperability areas with Active Directory. You have no idea how many corporate admins are not educated on interoperability between Exchange and Sendmail (and I know you know the latter 100% better than I do!).
It's not being a generalist...it's knowing how things interoperate and how to lock them down, both of which I KNOW you know
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Mitch