As a Technology Recruiter here in the Washington, DC / Virginia – Metro Area helping organizations identify top talent, I see waves & trends all the time. One day everyone’s looking for Microsoft .Net related folks, the next their looking for Infrastructure guys, then it’s “Cloud Computing” and Amazon’s EC2, then it’s “Data” this and “Data” that with the Hadoop / Cassandra / noSQL / Pig / Hive / Mahout / etc. of the world… But “1″ thing still reigns supreme, and that’s having a diversified programming portfolio aka “multiple programming languages in the toolbox”.

As Mugatu once said about Derek Zoolander,

“Who cares about Derek Zoolander anyway? The man has only one look, for Christ’s sake! Blue Steel? Ferrari? Le Tigra? They’re the same face! Doesn’t anybody notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!”

You don’t want to fall into that category. Do you want the Mugatu’s & Development Managers of the world throwing Jolt Cola on your Keyboards? My advice to you is to try live your Programming Life One Project at a Time. Don’t be afraid to mess around with a-little .NET one day & a-little Open-Source the Next. Would you want your Portfolio Manager telling you… “sorry I invested your life savings into Enron”. Whoopsie! Nope – you want a Diversified Channel of Attack. You want your defensive pass rush on an all-out-blitz coming up the middle & off the ends. You want the Gods to be on Your Side. So think out of the box, and bring more tools with you the next day when you hit the Construction Site.

Remember – Winning is Winning. You do whatever it takes to get the job done, just make it look clean. No body likes the dirty / smelly kid in class!

- ITrecruiterDC