I'm not saying it's not handy. It's great to be good at a lot of things.

My point is just that some people learn certain subjects faster than they learn other subjects. my thought is that if it takes the same effort to learn a little in an area where you are bad as to learn a lot in an area where you are good, and you have a limited amount of effort to apply, you are better off applying that effort to the area where you are good.

I'd say that is VERY situational. If the area you're bad at is, for an extreme example, 'managing to complete tasks you start', and something you're good at is 'eating Cheetos really quickly', then you can see where it would make sense to reinforce the bad before bothering to work on the good, just because it's easier.

You have a good point. some skills are more monitizable than others, and some skills are almost required for your other skills to be useful.

I'm actually one of those people who has had a hard time 'managing to complete tasks you start' (and while i still have that problem sometimes, I think i have accomplished more than the average bear.) - now, I do fight that directly some; you are right, it's too much in the way of everything else for me to ignore it because it's hard, like handwriting. They make some /really effective/ drugs for that these days, amongst other things, but as for 'hacks' to avoid that weakness? becoming a SysAdmin is one. If you can perform well in emergency situations, where you /can't/ drop things on the floor, lots of half-finished projects get forgiven. (and really, in SysAdmin work, if you don't take care of something when it's not an emergency, you take care of it when it /is/) I mean, it's bad to not complete things in non-emergency situations, maybe even worse than being a less productive programmer. But if you can 'hero' it out, even if that is the sub-optimal solution, you usually don't get fired for it. Management forgets that you only notice your sysadmin if he's not doing his job.

But, I find even the threat of an emergency motivates me to fix things, so I don't think add sysadmins need to remain in the less-useful 'hero' role forever... but being a sysadmin does mean that our failure mode usually doesn't get us fired.

If you can manage to hold down a job long enough to get some good experience, hiring other people can also be a way to get around this. I can start something and have someone else come along and clean up behind me. Also, just working with other people, I find, helps keep me on task.

but really, if I didn't have a skill that was relatively hard to find, well, for most of my life, I'd have had a hard time holding down a job at McDonalds. Nobody is going to deal with a fry cook who keeps Engineering hours.