Career advice calls that a specialization failure. The market disagrees. Technical skills now age out in roughly two and a half years by IBM's estimate, and when Microsoft and LinkedIn surveyed 31,000 people, 71 percent of leaders said they'd hire a less experienced candidate who works well with AI over a more experienced one who doesn't. Experience is compounded knowledge. Hiring managers just told you they'll trade it for adaptation speed.
Here's what the unfocused-looking people actually have: a loop that never changes while everything else does. Frame the problem. Find the prior art. Set the quality bar. Put the machines to work. Audit what comes back. The domain rotates weekly. The loop compounds for years.
Specialization was the right bet when skills aged slowly, because a decade in one lane bought you a moat. When the ground moves monthly, the moat is the speed of re-orienting: how fast you go from stranger to shipping in a domain you didn't know last week.
So before you diagnose your scattered quarter as a focus problem, check what it trained. Random work is the reps.
The unfocused look is what adaptability training looks like from the outside.