If you’re a federal IT manager or executive, you’ve probably spent more than a little bit of time evaluating the composition of your team’s skill set.  Do you have enough security experts on staff, enough analysts?  But have you considered whether you have enough polyglot programmers?    When Nate Rushfinn, Principal Enterprise Architect at CA Technologies, originally broached this topic with us, we scratched our heads as to why it would matter to federal agencies.  But then it became abundantly clear!  If your on-staff programmers are fluent in multiple coding languages the number of projects that can be taken on in-house is increased and their time to completion is dramatically decreased, thus making your IT department more efficient and cost effective.

In Nate’s opinion given how tight federal IT budgets are and, based on what is being demanded of them, agility is the next meta-skill that Federal CIOs and IT managers should be scouring resumes for as they build their teams.

We’ve included an excerpt for Nate’s piece over at his blog.  Why not hop on over to read the whole story and find out why it’s good to be a polyglot programmer…

“Check it out!” my brother said: “I am fluent in six languages!”  I didn’t believe it, so I pulled his profile up on LinkedIn. There it was on his resume—fluent in six major languages: Java, C++, Object Pascal, Visual Basic, TCL and JavaScript. Now I am picturing him ordering off a menu in Paris using JavaScript. But there was more: he was also fluent in 10 markup languages, 7 frameworks, and 8 databases on six different platforms—he was truly a polyglot. (Note: Wikipedia defines a polyglot as someone fluent is six or more languages.)

But what good is being a polyglot programmer? Most applications are written in just one language on a single system. Historically, whether you were using COBOL or C++, programmers controlled access to memory, processes to the CPU, built the interface, the middleware or business logic and managed the access to data. In the old model-view-controller (M-V-C) paradigm, everything ran on a single machine. Now the M-V-C components are split up across web servers, application servers, and database servers. Today, applications are an amalgam of components running on different systems on different platforms.

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