"Most of our lives are about proving something, either to ourselves or to someone else."
-- Anonymous
In an interview, it is the job of the interviewee to portray themselves as worthy of employment; the interviewer should not believe a single word. I prove myself by doing as I will with the task given to me, confident that my employer trusts my decisions. I prove myself by walking out of any interview where I hear the words "years of experience" or get a written exam. The whole point of college is to learn how to learn, not memorize every bubble-sort algorithm derivative.
My skill, my proof, comes from my ability to research and find unique solutions to difficult problems. My whole life is the amount of experience I have. If years were the only measure of skill, I would not have been able to optimize an Oracle application written by another DBA with six years of experience, by 4000%.
"Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma."
-- Frank Herbert
A good programmer or DBA does not know one language very well. They know the four basic language types, or the overall concept of data interaction. A person with these skills is a systems agnostic, and any experience they have in one language overlaps greatly with experience they have with others. Given a manual on an API in a language I've never used, I can write an application in mere days. I learned Java in three days to help a co-worker find a bug in his application. I found the bug, fixed it, and introduced thread safety and logging.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
-- Albert Einstein
My skill, my asset to an employer is not my experience, though that I have. What I offer is the ability to think and analyze around problems, to give solutions where none existed before. I write infrastructure, layout, and design into my projects. I document my thought process as well as the code so it may be useful to others. I imagine many aspects of everything I do, and love team environments that have brainstorming sessions because it fosters scalable and creative design.
My best tool of trade is my brain and my imagination. The languages I have learned are simply how I express my thoughts. Java, C/C++, Perl, Pascal, Python, Lisp, Ada, PHP; none of them are important. My skill lies in the fact that to me, everything is equal until they are weighed against each other for the needs of the company and project at hand.
Call me a solution consultant.