Last night during one of my final email checks of the day, I got an email message from a recruiter. What made this particular email interesting was that the recruiter didn’t bother to hide any of the addresses he had sent this email to, and I was able to see just how many people get targeted in these types of emails. In this case, it was 416 (or so I’m told–someone counted). I went to sleep shortly thereafter, and slept in, taking Friday off. When I woke up and finally got around to my first email check of the day, I was puzzled to see a thread in Gmail that was 61 messages long. Some poor schlub had hit reply-to-all on that recruiter’s email, and drama followed. People replied-to-all complaining at first, but then the emails quickly turned to seeing the humor in the situation. Then people started to introduce each other…

Over the years, I’ve encountered a number of people trying to specialize too narrowly in their jobs, to the detriment of all involved. Here are a few examples of the behavior I see most often…