This is great advice. Generalists have to engender a high degree of trust before they are considered reliable for some set of tasks, and if no one at the company knows you then it will be hard for you to demonstrate your skill set effectively. Telling the story of how you got those skills to management (and having good references to back it up) is pretty much the only way to gain that trust without already being in their network.

this. so. much.

I am a consultant, and i go through this process every new project. It isn't just getting a new job, its about new projects too at the same company.

Even after you got in, since a large company already has people filling all those roles, than you need to get into other people's business/territory.

It sounds really hard, politically.

I can barely pass technical bars because the last few times I interviewed I didn't understand the game well enough, but the second I'm in anywhere I start to get massive amounts of work done and make projects succeed on less code simply because my non-dev experience.

All big companies need and hopefully develop some people who are like this - its certainly part of the role I and few others had as the GOTO fixers.

This could vary from finding /building a pc for a new start when some one had forgotten to order a pc for them, fixing the BACS tape, doing initial deployments of systems including taking enough kit with us to build a network in case that had been forgotten.

The most interesting one was cracking nt4 to break into a client system - I got a break just on a power mac and didn't need to actually use all our sun workstations after ours to run a distributed attack (BT security / Squirrels) might have not been to happy (yes I did get authorisation)