No matter how we'd like to argue at the end of the day there are two types of people - those who are experts in one (relatively) narrow field and those who are capable/good at doing a lot of things but they don't shine in any.

During school we are taught generic education - they throw everything at you from literature, art to math and physics. By the time we get to university we start getting specialization. You already have some of the subjects fading away and with each year you get narrower in your field. This specialization happens also in programming - and it might seem a bit more subtle than you'd think at first. But it slowly creeps in day by day.

I've been meaning to expand my view on programming, try new things and learn a new language. And in this decision I found myself in a very much stuck in my narrow skill-set. You see - after spending 10k hours working with web, working with PHP, working with Laravel-like platforms I've trapped myself in thinking in certain directions, always thinking about certain issues.

I like learning by doing, code by building a prototype solution. For web its easy - I already have 5 ideas in my head for what I want to do and once I start pulling on one it tangles itself into another 5. But trying to do something else, something I am not familiar with, appears to be a lot more difficult. It is not only difficult to formulate the concept, but on top of it it is in a new language with new techniques, new processes. Every step comes slowly - even the point of setting up the environment to start writing code appears to be a lot trickier when its not something you've spent years to optimise.

It might seem better to be on the other side of the table. But its not - whilst having wide general knowledge is good, it is very limiting. Not only job opportunities will be more difficult because expert will do the job better but balancing this status quo in long term is very difficult.

In fairness I do believe that being a master of one field is a lot better than being jack of all - at least in long term. You just need to remember to try something else and different now and then.