In Vitruvius’ Ten Book on Architecture, Chapter 1, The Education of the Architect, Vitruvius calls for a wide foundation of knowledge for the architect, including art, math, history, philosophy, music, and medicine.  That a good architect should strive for a breadth of applicable knowledge.

He also points out the usefulness of understanding the nature of practice and theory in all of these subjects, that a balance should be maintained.

2. It follows, therefore, that architects who have aimed at acquiring manual skill without scholarship have never been able to reach a position of authority to correspond to their pains, while those who relied only upon theories and scholarship were obviously hunting the shadow, not the substance. But those who have a thorough knowledge of both, like men armed at all points, have the sooner attained their object and carried authority with them.

I would argue that the same logic is very well applied to our occupation today, in that over-specialization is not particularly suited to success.  That is, EA practitioners are IMHO better as generalists, with a breadth of knowledge, both technical, and non-technical.

For my part, I typically look for experience and success in the following areas:

• business (corporate and entrepreneurial)
• software development (multiple languages and types [OO, functional])
• systems administration
• creativity and problem solving skills
  
• engineering
  
• open source
• open standards
• development methodology
  
• Unix/Linux
  
• marketing
• writing
• speaking/presenting
• more…
  

In the real world, I see too many architects relying upon theory alone (hunting the shadow as it were), create problems for themselves and their teams.  For this reason, I’m a big fan of the people at CodingTheArchitecture.

Ten Books on Architecture from Project Gutenberg:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20239/20239-h/29239-h.htm

Originally Posted by john joseph roets at the-enterprise-architecture-network Google group, an example of reuse in writing.

Post in complete context here:
http://tinyurl.com/a8w5tk

MS wants to downplay US developer/IT quality to make the case that they need more H1B workers, in order to:
1. Bring in workers of dubious quality
2. (And the real reason) to lower the market rate on US developer/IT workers.

The same holds true on MS arguments on security clearance requirements for US Govt. work (MS is against).