I am a hiring manager and I have two resumes to choose from. One is a person with 15 years pure development experience and nothing else. The other is a person with 8 years development experience and 2 years in system security. All other things being equal, I know exactly whom I will choose every time.

No-one will ever be a "pure" anything. Not even consultants hired for a specific task. My current contract was to convert VB scripts on Win32 to Perl scripts on Unix. That was in May. I found out two days ago that this project is (and apparently has been) on indefinite hold and that my contract ends in 5 weeks, not 10. So, what have I been doing for almost 4 months? Very little Perl. I've been doing (in no particular order):

• VBA for Excel and Word
• Batch scheduling
• Perl (on both Win32 and Unix, both one-offs and modules)
• Project management
• Test development
• Project analysis
• Project design
• Batch schedule paradigm shifts
• Process analysis and remediation
• Document-generation automation

And, that's just what I can think of off the top of my head!

In other words, get the exposure! Have fun working. So what if you're not a "pure" developer?!? "Pure" is useful for virgins, academics, and chemicals. Nothing else.

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We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

The idea is a little like C++ templates, except not quite so brain-meltingly complicated. -- TheDamian, Exegesis 6

Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified.