"First and foremost, by being the best damned Java or C++ programmer their management had ever seen. In 1996, I took three Java books on my honeymoon, and read them. [...] Every single night after work on my C++ contracts, I would read something from Design Patterns and Stroustrup."
Truly, the author is a paragon of development expertise. He reads books (books!) on Java and DP. He's even read the manual of his programming language! That's one 133+ h4x0r there, I tell you. I'm in awe.
I get occasional contacts for Erlang development now, and all I did was to list it on my resume and start a Xing group about Erlang (which has no traffic). Not sure if it would be possible to convert these contacts into contracts (I rejected for other reasons, like location), as my Erlang experience amounts to doing a couple of projecteuler exercises. Just saying that recruiters are not only looking for Java developers.
"!@#$%^, we need a phoneme-based name-matcher but the programmer who built it in assembler retired years ago!" (Trans: Doug, we need you to write a fuzzy ILP system in Mercury)*
Two words: code reuse.
Various soundex algorithms are readily available in lots of languages. Even without them, implementing one shouldn't take more than a couple of hours... this guy seems to be more of a salesman than a programmer.
