I’ll attempt at stealing Marika’s traffic again.  And because my response is long enough to become a blog post:

Yes, Marika that is true.  Writing is an art.

Unfortunately, in a difficult economy you need to be a generalist.  I can write well too.  I can code really well.  But instead of concentrating on coding, I get to do a weird mix of planning, sending off communications, coding, writing documentation, system administration, et cetera.  It is not fun.  And while I am capable of doing all these tasks… I’d rather concentrate on what I really excel at.  But…

There are programmers that can outcode, outthink and outclass me in experience. The older experienced ones especially.  So I can’t compete on their level.  Also I rather have “a” job than “no” job.  And for most tasks in business, “good enough” bets “genuis”.  For coding a website you don’t need a Linus Torvald.  Nor do you need an Ernest Hemmingway for writing dry business articles about mergers and acquistions.  You don’t need a van Gogh, Monet or Da Vinci to paint walls.

Why is this?  Because “genius” is very, very expensive.  “Good enough” means a business can keep afloat, which is what business usually do.  And those profit margins for those fat cat capitalists?  They are razor thin in most cases.

Reality is if you are truly great, you get that awesome great dream fulfilling job.  Everyone else is on the scale of mediocre in terms of jobs.  The best way for that dream job is to be so great in a particular valuable niche, that it is either you or nobody else (for that price of course).  That is how the market goes.  So why quantity over quality?  I dunno.  Maybe because markets tend toward producing commodities for the unwashed masses.  The idea is to come up with a way to use resources to produce goods and services at nominal cost approaching zero.  That is a good thing for everyone.