And here are the answers i received to my dilema:

A1: Technical Recruiter

Encouraged is and should not be synonymous to forced. At least not in a normal company. Realistically speaking, “technology flexibility” is sometimes misunderstood, or used as an excuse for “Let’s accept anything we can get our hands on, but let’s not employ specialists. We can manage with what we already have and still keep low operational costs”.

I have been recruiting IT specialists for almost 4 years now and I can tell you that I’ve seen a lot of people that were specialized in one main technology (and it’s associated technologies).
So, if your employer makes you change technologies more often than you change your socks, you should seriously think about changing your job. It’s not possible, for anyone, to do everything right. You should choose a path, and try to stick to it.

A recruiter will surely ”buy” your profile if you prove to be/have:
- Stable. Not changing your job every year or so helps a lot.
- Certified. Depending on your field of expertise, there is surely some certification you could get – ex: Sun Java Certifications, Microsoft Certifications, etc. As your skills progress, you should get the certification that is correspondent to your level. For example, for Sun Java Certifications, you would have: SCJA -> SCJP -> SCJD / SCWCD / SCDBC / SCDJWS / SCMAD -> SCEA.
- Relevant experience and portfolio. Depending on the recruiting project in question, a recruiter will try to find people that have been working on similar projects, clients, types of industries, etc., and have the experience necessary to do the required job.
- Undertaken the normal steps in your career positions. It’s important for a recruiter to see that you have been a Junior Developer, Developer and then Senior Developer prior to being a Team Leader.
- Specific about your contribution towards the projects you were involved in. Don’t be lazy, write a couple of sentences about what you’ve worked on, what were your responsibilities, etc. Of course, be honest about all of those. It will help you a lot, considering that a good recruiter will appreciate the information and will be able to advertise you better when presenting your profile to the employer.
- Good recommendations. Always helps to be recommended by prior colleagues, employers, clients, etc. For obvious reasons.

Do all of those, try to be a good professional, be realistic and you shouldn’t have any problem in getting the job you want.

A2 : Senior Developer

One of the interesting area’s of application development is the topic of design patterns. Patterns to solve coding issues which have been proven effective. Specifically in the area of object oriented programming and client server programming patterns are extremely useful.

If you are able to learn patterns, and you can show that you are able to apply these pattern in the languages you mention any recruiter you have a very good story about your expertise.

Programming languages differ, patterns do not and are a stable starting point. Good luck !
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_pattern_%28computer_science%29

A3 : Technical Manager

Consider vendor neutral industry recognized certifications such as those offered through CompTIA. Whether it is A+, Network+, Security+ or some other certification, they all were developed through contributions from IT industry leading companies with the intent of establishing baseline or benchmark knowledge that could be built upon with vendor specific training.

But, when working as a developer, what can be considered an achievement ?

Unlike a salesman, that can say how many products he sold, how can the developer evaluate his work ? Or how is his work evaluated ?

I have asked this question and here are the answers that I received from people with a quite diverse background :

From an academic researcher :

A developer is a simple black-box-machine:
- input: software specifications
- output: piece of software that fills the requirements of the specification.

You have to evaluate the quality of the output (the software: the code + the documentation + tools + etc.).
Quality is represented by many parameters:

- amount of requirements that are or not implemented
- amount of bugs and security leaks
- maintainability ,portability ,brute performance ,elegance ,time needed

Then, as it is heavily non-linear, you have to find scales for each parameter, giving higher coefficients for what is the most important for you.

From a project manager :

The work of a software developer could be evaluated using the metrics “man*days”.
A software developer (programmer) receives from a functional analyst a “specification” to (software) develop and a dead-line (each specification is previously estimated, as if the development is realised by a medium level programmer) and estimations are included in MS Project planning by PM).
By comparing programmer’s results with estimation you have a clear report between a programmer qualified “medium level” and the studied human resource.

From a senior consultant :

If the product of a software developer is software, then you are measuring the quality of the software (using whatever criteria you normally use), and the quality of the code. It also depends on how much freedom the developer has.
For example, implementing a routine specification using an rigidly established set of methods (paint-by-numbers programming) would have a different set of standards from open ended problem solving.

From an HR person :

- Education background
- Number of years of experience
- Number of quality projects executed
- Customer feedback
- Certifications on domain or technology
- Respect and conduct in team

The greatest achievement is to stay one or two steps ahead of the curve with the new releases of your sw language and/or tools

From an entrepreneur :

As a company owner, we consider lot of factors, some are measurable and some are not.

Following are some of them:

- He/she should understand client’s perspective and do the work by considering project as their own. This is vital as currently the developers are working for the sake of money and complete the things quickly whatever assigned by managers. They do not think out of box about the projects and related issues.
- They should be good team player. I believe that at last team wins not a single performer. So he should work easily in any team.
- Quality in whatever he develops. We measure this by review of code as well as the bugs produced by the module done by them.
- The last but most important is he must be quick learner. In Software industry, there are lot of things regularly updating and changing. And in such environment, if developer just do one work with great value doesn’t count. There should be some motivation into developer to learn new things quickly and also apply those into the project.

This depends mainly of the company’s policy and the type of person they are looking for. Also sometimes the technical interview comes befor the Human Resources.

In most of the cases at each of these interviews there are around two persons present : the project manager or the manager of the company and a more technical person that is interested in testing your technical skills.

It usually starts in the same way, by asking you to present yourself. The approach this time should be more focused on the technical details and mention the proffesional experiences by emphasising the aspects that you know the company is interested in. For example if they are looking for a .Net developer, it would be a good idea to focus on getting into details about your .Net knowledge and projects, but mention and just overview you experiences with the Java technology.

While you describe the projects you worked in, some of the questions may be how long the project lasted, how many people were involved, who the client was, what was your role in the project, why was a certain technology used and not another.
Sometimes these are all the questions you might get at the technical interview.

Other times things get a little into more details.For example, after you finish presenting yourself usually the technical guy will look over each of your projects and start asking you from general question related to each of them to more detailed ones.In one of my interviews for which I was applying for a job as a .Net developer the questions were like this :

• What is Agile Programming?
• What are the project management models that you know ?Ex : v-model, waterfall model
• What do you know about Corba ?
• If you have used UML, what is the version of UML you used ?
• Describe the Model View Control architectural pattern.
• What is CRUD and what is it used for? (create, read, update and delete)
• Have you worked with .Net Nuke and if yes can you tell what it is ?
• Which are the features of an NTier application ?
• What are the web parts in .Net?
• What are master pages ?
• What are the Design Patterns ?
• What is the difference between a Data Grid and a Grid View ?
• What are the Generics in C # ?
• What are the sealed classes ?
• What is a string builder ?
• What is the size of the string variables ?
• What is an web service ?
• What is the difference between the C++ API and a web service ?
• Regarding SVN, what the chain of changes were.

After some technical questions like this, usually the company and the company’s projects are presented and also the role they might have in mind for you. And the salary question comes up again as well as the availability to start, the mobility you have for going to work to a client’s place.