There are niches wide enough to fit a polymath in, it's true. They're hard to find, though, and often self-carved, from what I've seen. Your mention of the web, though, reminds me of a sort of strange pro-specialisation rant I often think but have yet to blog: Every time I see an ad for a web designer, it specifies that the designer "should have knowledge of Photoshop, Illustrator, Corel, Fireworks, HTML, XML, ASP, PHP, JavaScript, Java..." or somesuch weird combination. Frankly, I don't know what sort of planet these recruiters are living on. This might well be a massive overgeneralisation, but both studios I've worked in had team of designers and a team of developers and each team had a different skillset. Not one of the designers could code much beyond HTML and possibly a bit of JavaScript. Not one of the coders could design, although they could take our designs and chop 'em up just right. I was one of those who could to design and HTML, but it struck me then that however polymathic my mind was, the sort of mind that is good at concepts and visuals and ideas is not very good at the hard, cold logic of programming. ASP? PHP? Java? Forget it. Of course, there is bound to be someone who is an exception to this, but it pisses me off that employers these days believe that coders-who-design are actually designers. Usually, they're not. Usually, the shite they come up with as a 'design' makes me weep. Ok, I'm not a Goddess of Golden Pixel, but I have some appreciation of balance and colour and form and style and all those other things that go into good design. These demands for designers who are programmers stems, patently, from the budgetary squeeze that HR departments are under. After the bust, suddenly no one wants to pay for two people when they can only pay for one, so either as a designer you learn these alien programming skills or, and I suspect this happens more readily, programmers get design jobs. For once, my polymathy fails me. However, that's fine. I don't want to be programmer. When I was nine we got a ZX80 and I learnt how to program it in Basic. It was easy. Ten years later, when I was at uni, I walked the programming module. It was really easy. If I'd been a programmer at heart then I would have developed those skills - I had plenty of opportunity. Obviously, programming was not close to my heart. Instead, I view my polymathy as the perfect preparation for my *cough*career*cough* as writer. After all, it's all grist to the mill, and who knows when I might need to call upon a knowledge of graptolites, language learning techniques or social networking for some crucial plot point or feature for some Sunday magazine?