> Specialising is only possible in larger companies (more than 500 employees).

I think it depends on the company. You get niches at 10 employees.

> A smaller company might want to hire a backend expert, but who might have to jump into front-end for short periods - sort of an 80-20 split.

Yeah, like I mentioned, I don't mind that. At one company, I ported our network daemon to Windows XP.