Not quite the same class, but they are well beyond "starting character." It's just that none of them are...all that great. They don't suck or anything, as written, but none of them have the zillion-dice or zillion-init or zillion-soak magic that a dedicated, specialized, Runner has...but they also lack true generalist variety and capabilities.

None of 'em are crap, don't get me wrong, and I was as horrified as everyone else when I read through that adventure. They're just not as badass as I think they could be, given everything we've been told about the Tir military and Tir specops (and their integration of magic and metal), in the background.

I think that the term 'multiclassing' can rarely be applied to mundane character types. Afterall, they've got so much karma to pour into skills that it'd be fairly rediculous not to have acquired a broad range of skills after surviving into the end of a campaign. As an exclusive mundane type (Priority E, baby) I expect to be a jack of all trades, and master of... well, quite a bit.

It's between the cracks of a whole load of active, lingua, and knowledge skills that we're able to pull ahead of our more fantasy inclined brethern.

Mages on the other hand? Sure. But that's more of a matter of choosing to split karma between skills, spells, initiation, or powerpoints. The difference between getting those optical implants, and sacrificing awakened potential rather than just popping on some equipment that provides the equivalent.

Even then, I'm not sure if that's 'multiclassing', or just diversifying at the expence of potency. Generally, I find the magician that pours everything into Magic will excel, while compartatively the one that doesn't leave the 'mundane' tasks to the 'mundanes' won't shine quite as bright. Afterall, your smartlink is nice, but your Fireball is better - It's cool that you want to help me open this maglock, but it's no substitute for our decker, and a silence spell on the hinges would be much more useful - You want thermographic vision permanently? - And either way, I'm still dual wielding MGL-6s, with spurs bloody rare from the last mook the GM tossed my way, so get those spirits off my back already.

Of course, this is all opinion, speculation, observation, and general open ended experience.

-RM

I've always been a fan of the "Classless" GAme. Ie Games that don't like you into one mindset of class and penalizes you for thinking of doing anything else. Thus one of the great pleasures of SR is the flexibility of the System. Sure you can have the Streetsam all-combat no other skills man-machine...and have lots of fun playing him...or you can do the PhysMage with a little Cyber and Complementary spells or awhatever else you like.
My only problem with running for long time SR players is that everyone tends to take the same sort of outlook at Team Gen; "Okay we need at least one mage for healing, one streets am, one rigger, a B&E specialist, a Face and a Decker, okay so who wants to play what? And who's going to take redundant skills so we have at least two of every skill in the party and everyone has SOME kind of Combat Skills..."
Bit too much like the old D&D Saw of "Must have Fighter, Mage, Thief and Cleric"
One of the best games I played started with no-one allowed to have more than 20K in starting cash and were basically streetkids. Had to work a LOT harder to make the money then but we had a lot more fun.

I guess the point of this is that theres a fine line between cheese and role-playing.
Sure you can justify having every character with the same basic set of skills and juggle the miscellaneous around a bit...or you can build a party full of no-body's who get sucked into the criminal world.
Here's a fun challenge for the next SR game someone starts: All of the characters are High-school students, maybe even Junior High in a suburban Seattle School. For the most part they have normal high-school lives until someones BTL dealer shows up looking for money, GF gets pregnant and they need the money for an abortion whatever...but draw them slowly into the seedy, dark and nasty world that is Shadowrun. Hell have fun with parents yanking children froma school that Allows a Troll student...hrm I like the idea...think that will be my next campaign: Shadowrun 98109