Greer - Source Boston - 13 March 2008

While some people like to say "Specialization is for insects," tell
me that the security field itself is not specializing.  We have
people who are expert in forensics on specific operating system
localizations, expert in setting up intrusion response, expert in
analyzing large sets of firewall rules using non-trivial set theory,
expert in designing egress filters for universities that have no
ingress filters (like MIT next door), expert in steganographically
watermarking binaries, and so forth.  Generalists are becoming rare,
and they are being replaced by specialists.  This is speciation in
action, and the narrowing of niches.  In rough numbers, there are
somewhere close to 5,000 various technical certifications you can
get in the computer field, and the number of them is growing thus
proving the conjecture of specialization and speciation is not just
for insects and it will not stop.