Ian Livingston, chief executive of BT, told me last week more than a third of the telecoms group’s staff are now engineers – a higher proportion than ever. But whereas their expertise once covered mainly the maintenance and repair of an analogue telephone network, he now expects them to do more.

At BT, the ideal field employee – who used to need “craft and mechanical skills”, according to another executive – must combine in-depth expertise in a particular domain with broad knowledge of other areas.

But while the drive to employ such “T-shaped” workers makes sense, it also makes me anxious – and not only because I think of myself as a generalist journalist, another category doomed to extinction.