Last week a co-worker and I were talking about different computer languages and what employers look for when hiring computer scientist. At some point in the middle of our heated “discussion” my co-worker begin to tell me about an interviewee from a small startup company told her about a person they had just hired to do some work with a Biztalk server. Then she went on to tell me that this company offered the person $600,000! Now I don’t know about you but I had never even heard of Biztalk up until that point so like with anything else I googled it. I found out that Biztalk is a Microsoft product first released in 2000 for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) solution, with built-in support for XML and SOAP. It offers integration with Visual Studio .NET (so if you’re a .NET wiz you might want to look into this). Which means with Biztalk companies can integrate information from many different applications like with no problems. In a nut shell Biztalk takes applications that can’t “talk” to each other and gives them the capability to do so. Sound interesting right and with a payday like $600k who wouldn’t want to look into Biztalk right? Well Biztalk isn’t that wildly used and doesn’t offer that many positions out there (even thought when I last checked there was 475 Biztalk developer positions on Monster.com). This brought me and my co-worker to ask ourselves: Would I rather be a specialist and work with a little known technology for a big payday at the risk of not finding a position, or would I rather be well versed in a well know technology that is impossible to master but with many job opportunities? Me personally I believe in making yourself as marketable as possible so whatever will give me the most opportunities is what I’ll go for. What about you? What side of this discussion are you on?
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