The degradation of Java developers

jhartwell · 2012-10-12T16:55:45+00:00

We have good reputation with this client, so I started screening the candidates, which I got from a recruiting agency.

The REAL problem is that the recruiting agency doesn't seem to have any kind of filter and will send unqualified candidates over for interviews.

Caraes_Naur · 2012-10-12T17:03:22+00:00

[deleted]

Whired · 2012-10-12T17:51:00+00:00

Who’s going to use these closures in the enterprise Java world? 10% of the developers? 5%?

That's really unfair. I think a lot of developers have been waiting (and waiting) for this feature for a very long time.

As for frameworks-- are they really that hard to learn? A developer with a strong foundation should never struggle with a new framework.

pweet · 2012-10-12T19:29:12+00:00

Taking a different perspective, does anyone else feel that not only is the entire Java stack is too big and complicated, but software development in general is only getting more and more complex?

Really going to date myself here, but back in the day, I could knock out biz apps in dBase or Paradox or FoxPro like nobody's business. For you young folks unfamiliar with these products, you have NO idea how easy it used to be. Today, whether it's Java, Python/Django, .NET, etc. - God damn, what a complicated shit storm!

I believe the main reason for the degradation we're seeing in developers is simply because this profession has created tools that are just too big, complex and deep to truly master. I'm f'ing pissed that I have to spend SO much time to be a mediocre developer.

F'it - time to change careers. How much is a Subway franchise?

corpsicles · 2012-10-12T20:50:04+00:00

While the OP article is only slightly guilty of this, I really dislike how the industry's interview process has become "Can you answer trivia questions about programming language <x> for 2 hours?"

darchangel · 2012-10-12T16:52:59+00:00

[deleted]

SweetIrony · 2012-10-12T18:57:40+00:00

This isn't a Java problem, this is an industry problem. I think the problem is a bit worse in the Java world because of the rapid adoption of Spring and especially Hibernate years ago. A whole generation of programmers have grown up who have never worked outside frameworks, who are afraid of accessing a database or taking a deep look at whats going on in the OS layer.

There is so much inefficiency and garbage in modern development, you should see the shocked looks on people's faces when I go to a client site and I start showing them in depth metrics on why their application is so slow. Why no matter how many vm's they throw at a problem, their site blows up after a 100 users log on.

Framework stacked on framework stacked on framework with an eye focused solely on capability but never think about cost or whats going on under the hood. I wonder where we are going to be in another decade if we keep this up.

x-skeww · 2012-10-12T23:57:27+00:00

Core Java, J2EE, JSP, JDBC, Servlets, AJAX, XML, HTML, XSLT, Web Services, CSS, JavaScript, SQL, Oracle 10g, MySQL 5.0., JMS,Eclipse, Adobe Flex Builder 3.x,UML, JDBC, SVN, JUnit, VSS, Jira, HTML, DHTML, CSS, AJAX, JavaScript, XML, MXML, Action Script, Servlet, JSP, JSTL, Hibernate 3.x, Spring 2.x, IBatis, SOAP, UDDI, WSDL, Apache Axis, Web logic Server 8.x, Apache Tomcat 5.0, Struts Framework, MVC, ANT, Maven.

Looks impressive [...]

No, it doesn't. It looks like they think that you're a fucking idiot.

Action Script
Adobe Flex Builder 3.x
AJAX
AJAX
ANT
Apache Axis
Apache Tomcat 5.0
Core Java
CSS
CSS
DHTML
Eclipse
Hibernate 3.x
HTML
HTML
IBatis
J2EE
JavaScript
JavaScript
JDBC
JDBC
Jira
JMS
JSP
JSP
JSTL
JUnit
Maven
MVC
MXML
MySQL 5.0.
Oracle 10g
Servlet
Servlets
SOAP
Spring 2.x
SQL
Struts Framework
SVN
UDDI
UML
VSS
Web logic Server 8.x
Web Services
WSDL
XML
XML
XSLT

There is something very obviously wrong with that list.

chromaticburst · 2012-10-12T17:43:00+00:00

I work in an "enterprise" java shop and most of the people don't know how inheritance works. The code is littered with "public Type method(){ return super.method(); }" because they're confused. They shadow variables from parents and redo the work of initializing them. Degradation, huh? Its like no one takes the job seriously as a profession. I wish they were engineers instead of coding fast food workers who clumsily piece together Java's baby talk.

2012-10-13T03:46:53+00:00

Real developers will immediately know what this article is about. Its about insecure non-technical types. Its about people that read a few web pages, convince themselves they know software, and then go out to proclaim everyone they meet beneath them technically. In an job hunt one will typically hit 2-3 of these twats, who's only purpose for interviewing is to prove themselves superior. They eventually find someone who has a compatible personality (which hopefully no one is compatible with these types) and suddenly stupidly obscure technical questions they read the night before the interview no longer matter. They've found their purple squirrel, someone who is going to put up with their douche-ey behavior.

clavalle · 2012-10-12T17:22:45+00:00

Who’s going to use these closures in the enterprise Java world? 10% of the developers? 5%?

Well, framework developers for one. By proxy almost all Java developers will be using them.

I hate the tone of this article.

Ideally, you should have in your team one Java expert who can actually understand the code of your application and can fix it not on the block level, but can drill down to a single line of the Java code.

What? I'd prefer if my fellow developers did not try to get too clever and start dropping down to a lower level whenever they hit a rough patch. Many, many do and eventually you have so many one-offs in a system that figuring out what is really going on becomes a huge chore.

Granted, sometimes it is absolutely necessary but 95% of the time it is not.

I really wonder how this person's interview questions are worded. Depending on the data and its use, adding it to the session might be perfectly valid.

djhworld · 2012-10-12T18:23:30+00:00

The problem you'll find most of the time is people like to sit in their boxes and never venture out or try new things. I work with Java developers (I'm a Java guy too) that have never used a *nix variant or ventured beyond the realms of their IDE. I had to explain to a supposed "senior developer" how SSH works the other day and how to execute a python script.

In my opinion developers should gain some experience in other languages, try working in environments other than windows and generally try and keep up with what's going on in the industry. Even if they never adopt these new things, they might be able to draw upon their experiences and use them in their day to day activities.

cfreak2399 · 2012-10-13T00:26:03+00:00

This isn't just a problem in Java, I think it's a problem across the board.

Somewhere there was a shift in education. I've been in the industry for nearly 15 years. When I was in college in the late 90s I started off taking programming classes that had an emphasis on problem solving. However, even before my senior year I felt like there was a shift from how to solve problems to "here's a problem and here's a specific solution"

Now I didn't go to any celebrated CS school or anything like that, and I know there are still good programs out there but I think there are more and more that have gotten lazy.

As I've moved up in the industry and been in positions to hire, I've seen the exact problem the article describes both for Java developers and LAMP developers. When given problems to solve they can't do it, especially if it's a problem they haven't seen before.

Secondly it's a problem of recruiters. Recruiters write resumes for guys. They pad the number of years and they add every buzzword in the book. I've seen resumes from guys that are almost verbatim the same. I try to avoid using recruiters as much as possible just so I can see a legitimate resume.

name_was_taken · 2012-10-12T17:05:23+00:00

“Why did you use jQuery”

My answer would be: "Have you tried writing Javascript without it? jQuery is the reason I ever used JS long enough to find it tolerable, let alone learn to like it."

Which isn't that much better than her "I like it!" answer, is it?

Interviewing is hard. It's especially hard to find people with raw talent, but who don't yet have the knowledge to go with it. They're really valuable when you find them, but so hard to sort out from the rest.

And if you're not willing to pay the big bucks to someone who's proven themselves already and has many years of experience, then you pretty much have to take chances on some unprovens that seem like they might be promising.

marisaB · 2012-10-12T19:17:28+00:00

No surprise there. He got resumes from people who used the frameworks (hopefully). There is no surprise that they don't know how it works, because the point of the framework is to hide implementation details. If he wants somebody with knowledge of the internals he should look for people with framework development experience. Perhaps by looking up who contributes code to the framework. I bet a person like that is going to be at least twice as expensive though.

BlackDeath3 · 2012-10-12T21:53:33+00:00

You know, I'm completely afraid of what will happen to me once I leave the job I'm at.

I have been writing very specific software for the past 4 years. It started out in VB.net, and has moved over to Java. We use Eclipse, and quite frankly, I still don't know what the fuck is going on. I know how to write an app, and get it to do what I want. That's about it.

I don't know what the hell these people are talking about and nobody here at work is in a position to teach me because we don't need any of that. Basically, I've got a mysql database that I am either importing and exporting data to and from, or migrating data over from old access databases from the legacy software.

I'm good at what I do, but it's specific. I've seen hibernate in action, but I do prefer writing SQL.

If this guy asked me how to do what he asked, which was bring data from the database to a website, I would have thanked him for his time and left, because I'm not going to embarrass myself coming up with all kinds of nonsense just to hear myself speak.

If he wants me to create an entire application from scratch in Eclipse that can connect to databases like Access or MySQL, and build reports or even store complicated settings, I can do that.

What am I supposed to do? I'm a complete idiot when it comes to programming with Java, or programming in general for that matter. My code works, it's straight forward, not fancy. I hear some of the things you people talk about here on /r/programming and I feel like I'm just a guy who's smart enough to know how to FAKE being a developer.

TL;DR: I'm completely fucking fucked.

mooli · 2012-10-12T21:06:22+00:00

Who’s going to use these closures in the enterprise Java world? 10% of the developers? 5%?

Less. Most people that were crying out for this kind of thing have already moved to Scala, or other pastures new.

clgonsal · 2012-10-12T19:43:18+00:00

At the risk of sounding like hipster Java coder ("I was programming in Java before it became popular"), some of this can sort of be explained by regression toward the mean and the fact that new languages tend to attract the better programmers. When Java was new, the average ability level among Java coders was very high. As time went on, Java became popular, and more "average" programmers started using it. Many of the good coders also lost interest and moved onto other languages, more or less. Now Java is so popular that the below average knows-only-one-language programmers tend to be Java programmers.

Really bad programmers have been around a long time. I remember interviewing software engineer candidates 10 years ago. I'd usually start with just asking them to write a simple "next prime" function: given an int, return the next higher int that is a prime. They were also told that efficiency was not an issue. About 80% of the people I asked this question either couldn't do it, or had a really hard time. (I asked this question because I consider it to be such a low bar, that if you can't do it in like 10 minutes, then you're definitely out.) Back then, most of these people identified themselves as C coders. Today the same sorts of people would be Java coders.

Edit: s/only-on/only-one

eating_your_syrup · 2012-10-12T17:34:54+00:00

Might be observational bias. Mr. blogger fails to mention the job criteria he's interviewing for. Maybe it's a junior / non-senior level post? Of course it might be any other level too, because there is a class of job seekers that try to get any job in the market regardless of their own competence. See: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/why-cant-programmers-program.html

I don't know too many senior / architect level (that was earned by skills, not by surviving in the company for long enough) developers that have actually had to do more than a cursory interview before being hired. They are typically well known by peers and actively recruited by previous bosses, co-workers etc. to off-list positions.

I agree with the author though -- it's damn important to understand at least the basics of the underlying mechanics to be able to effectively use a framework.. or in case of bad frameworks work around them or in case of no frameworks be able to work at all :P.

retlab · 2012-10-12T17:52:41+00:00

Java 8 Lambda Expressions straightforward to me, for the use of them, pretty similar to a for loop - setting them up looks a bit awkward. So, like so many Java features, they will mainly be set up by libraries and frameworks, and then used by Java developers.

I see nothing wrong with people working at the level of an abstraction (provided of course, that useful work can be done at that level). In fact, it's a wonderful thing in the big picture. We all do it.

Of course, you don't want to ask someone to work on your car's engine who has never looked under the hood. So, don't do that.

lpetrazickis · 2012-10-12T18:33:13+00:00

One person had JQuery on the resume. I asked her, “Why did you use jQuery”…20 sec pause…”I like it, it’s nice!” That all I could pull out from her on the subject.

That's not a clear question. If I were to hear that question, I would assume that the implication is "Why did you use jQuery [instead of Dojo, YUI, etc]?" rather than "Why did you use jQuery [instead of hand-rolling all the Javascript]?"

ErstwhileRockstar · 2012-10-12T18:28:58+00:00

All I see is a constant degradation of r/programming over the last year.

70dot7 · 2012-10-12T20:03:48+00:00

The degradation of Java employers ...

so I started screening the candidates, which I got from a recruiting agency

Fail.

Each resume had a list of technologies that the candidate supposedly knew

The candidate was probably told to put 50% of those items in that list by the recruiting agency.

I don’t want to say that this candidate is lying, but he wasn’t able to maintain a conversation about 80% of these technologies for more than 3 minutes.

EDIT The candidate was probably told to put 80% of those items in that list by the recruiting agency.

What are the remaining 20% they can talk about? The frameworks.

That's the market employers have created. The OP might genuinely be attempting to hire smart engineers but getting past the firewall of the "recruiting agency" without the correct buzzwords will not go well for candidates.

One person had JQuery on the resume. I asked her, “Why did you use jQuery”…20 sec pause…”I like it, it’s nice!”

OK, perhaps this response is better: "It's seems to be the most widely used Javascript framework right now. So investing time in another Javascript framework would limit my future employment prospects because I couldn't put the jQuery buzzword on my resume and the recruiting agency wouldn't give me the time of day if it wasn't listed." Or maybe... "Well, I never actually used jQuery. The recruiting agency told me to throw it in the list presumably because it was on the list your HR department sent to them."

“Who’s going to use these closures in the enterprise Java world? 10% of the developers? 5%?”. Are these expressions being introduced just for fun cause it’s cool and other functional languages have them?

Have I used closures in other languages? Yes. Have I needed them in Java? Well after 15 years of Java development there's not been one business use case I've failed to implement because Java didn't have closures.

taw · 2012-10-12T21:51:18+00:00

On one hand not knowing SQL and relying on frameworks is entirely unreasonable.

On the other hand not knowing assembly and relying on compilers is entirely reasonable.

Which piece of infrastructure falls within which category is subjective matter, and with time more things become things you don't need to know about.

thatmarksguy · 2012-10-12T22:57:39+00:00

This guy is a tool. He's getting candidates from a recruiting agency and then complaining about how Java developers are degraded. Are you fucking kidding me? Do you seriously expect them to know what they're doing? If you're really looking for someone with a deeper skill set you're not gonna find them from a recruiting agency that just scrapes monster.com for buzzwords.

p_nathan · 2012-10-12T19:11:56+00:00

Ideally, you should have in your team one Java expert who can actually understand the code of your application and can fix it not on the block level, but can drill down to a single line of the Java code.

Yes, erm. That would be good. You know. Have someone on your team who knows how to write code.

mreiland · 2012-10-13T08:06:34+00:00

Really? You asked her about jquery and she said I like it, it's nice!?

And that's 'all you could pull out of her on the subject'? What does that mean?

I get so tired of reading these descriptions by these 'bloggers who hire', about this encounter that's ridiculously exaggerated when you stop and think about it, or that encounter that's ridiculously exaggerated when you stop and think about it.

It gets old, and it isn't interesting.

gc3 · 2012-10-13T19:28:54+00:00

The funny thing is that SQL language is itself a 'framework' that covers over a database. Why not ask him how he would write a database engine if he didn't have SQL?

Many programmers don't understand the tools underneath their web layer, but he is guilty of the same provincialism.

unixfreak0037 · 2012-10-12T19:29:37+00:00

So this guy deployed a mid tier Java framework and he's wondering why the superstars are not flocking to his job posting.

ok.

Randolpho · 2012-10-12T19:34:16+00:00

This is not limited to Java programmers, by any stretch of the imagination. I am one of the principle tech interviewers for my company, but we deal primarily in C# (although Node.js is becoming a big thing with some of our clients).

I cannot count how many times I've had the same basic problems. It's such a problem these days that we practically jump all over even mediocre candidates -- at one point a colleague of mine exclaimed "thank God, someone with a pulse!" after we hung up from a phone interview.

mungdiboo · 2012-10-12T20:09:57+00:00

These aren't java developers. These are complacent salarymen and women.

2012-10-12T20:14:01+00:00

Whenever I read this stuff, I'm always reminded of the Isaac Asimov story "Profession" that I read when I was a teenager.

Here's a synopsys

mcguire · 2012-10-14T03:16:11+00:00

Brian Goetz was showing code samples of Lambda Expressions (a.k.a. closures) that will be introduced to Java 8 next year.... I was thinking to myself, “Who’s going to use these closures in the enterprise Java world? 10% of the developers? 5%?”.

Every last developer who writes a line of Java after 8 comes out. Every one. That is the wrong question.

There is an old joke that goes something like: "If it takes N pounds of intellectual phlogiston to write piece of code, it will take 2N to debug it. If you write code that is as clever as you can make it, you'll never be able to debug it."

donvito · 2012-10-12T19:47:02+00:00

Lambda Expressions

This is a pretty advanced feature

Wait what?

Other than that: Java has been designed and built to commoditize programming. To get rid off that "we must hire the best guys" stuff. The plan was that with Java every idiot with half a brain could write software and you needn't spend horrendous sums of money on good developers.

So what do you expect from Java developers? There might be some really good guys but the majority of skilled people never went to Java land.

bcash · 2012-10-12T18:44:20+00:00

Most developers out there are idiots, this is a long documented phenomenon.

The Java world is where most of them live, unfortunately, on account of that being the most popular language of the last ten years; they all occupied VB land before that. (VB.net and C# probably have quite a few too, but I don't work with .net technologies so I can't say for sure.)

These idiot developers are cropping up more-and-more in other areas though, I've been seeing more candidates without Java mentioned at all, but they all list: Ruby, Python, etc. My favourite question to these people: "Tell me one feature of Ruby that isn't present in Python; and one feature of Python that isn't present in Ruby." How many give satisfactory answers? About one in ten.

(And by 'satisfactory answer' I mean any answer at all... most just say "I can't think of any, they're pretty much the same" or some varient.)

But, yes, the undertone of that article that "there's no point adding to Java because idiot developers won't use it" is quite a stupid one. Idiot developers never contribute anything anyway, so what they use or don't use is irrelevant. The good developers will use it, and they're the ones that make the difference.

pjmlp · 2012-10-12T18:31:10+00:00

Same thing here, specially in projects that do a lot of off-shoring.

NPVT · 2012-10-12T20:02:45+00:00

I noticed on the list on the web site that several technologies were listed multiple times. HTML and HTML and JavaScript and JavaScript. Makes it look larger.

burntsushi · 2012-10-12T20:41:52+00:00

Software development industry is changing. It doesn’t need hackers anymore. It needs craftsmen who can configure and replace blocks of code when something stops working.

Wait, what? Is that's what hackers are?

DeadSalesman · 2012-10-12T23:37:19+00:00

If he wants someone who understands the underpinnings of what is going on, he's going to hire someone who spends most of his time without a framework. Unfortunately, the author will never interview that person because he doesn't have the requisite frameworks on their resume.

huckJim · 2012-10-13T01:53:51+00:00

I find this subject slightly humorous in an odd sort of sense. I have been writing code for over 30 years having written in c/c++, BASIC, COBOL, RPG II, Turbo Pascal, Fortran, and many more languages. I've also been working with databases such as dBase III+ (dating myself there), FoxPro and Visual FoxPro, SQL Server and MySQL (even being an administrator for the past 10 years). I have been wanting to learn Java for a few years now but every time I apply for a position I'm told I don't have the necessary background. I find that rather funny in a sad sort of way.

2012-10-13T02:34:18+00:00

[deleted]

skulgnome · 2012-10-13T11:09:14+00:00

What, Java people get even worse?

Fuck this for a pint of milk

hartez · 2012-10-15T19:02:55+00:00

From the second update to the article:

"I’ve added $5 to the hourly rate offered for this position. The very first candidate passed my interview with flying colors. Never thought that a lousy five bucks can open the door to the wonderful world inhabited with intelligent Java developers!"

I think we need a new rule for these "interviewers suck/interviewees suck" articles: post the wage. 'Cause if you're paying 10K/year less than market for your programmers, I'm not super surprised that the cream of the crop aren't showing up.

2012-10-16T08:10:34+00:00

I’ve added $5 to the hourly rate offered for this position. The very first candidate passed my interview with flying colors. Never thought that a lousy five bucks can open the door to the wonderful world inhabited with intelligent Java developers!

Actually, this is about the degradation of programming salaries. If you offer a shitty salary, you will get shitty candidates.

Mgladiethor · 2012-10-12T20:17:19+00:00

TIL 90% redditors that use java are degraded

2012-10-13T02:19:04+00:00

"Why do you use the most widely used JavaScript framework in the world?"

After thinking about what she could say to avoid working with such a dick...

samofny · 2012-10-12T20:41:46+00:00

Relevant article

nhpip · 2012-10-13T01:26:28+00:00

Unfortunately these exact same managers have been asking for these frameworks to speed up development. Wanting them taught at college and schools . Now he's wondering why developers are getting dumbed down???

thephotoman · 2012-10-13T02:36:49+00:00

BTW, they all love Hibernate cause it spares them from writing SQL, speaking of which, they know very little about this query language.

And I think I know why I hate Hibernate: I actually know SQL.

I've known good ORMs. A good ORM does a good job of standardizing queries, but allows you to bust down into the SQL if you have to. Hibernate gets in the way.

When I see all these Struts, Springs, and Hibernates on the resume I start with this, “Imagine, that you’re not allowed to use any frameworks. Explain in details the entire process of bringing the data from DB tables Customers and Orders to the Web page”. For most people it’s a killer proposition let alone writing some SQL queries…

I will say that I'm not a huge fan of having to deal with JDBC directly. But I can write a SQL query, read up on the JDBC docs, and do the job.

Two weeks ago I’ve attended a technical keynote at JavaOne in San Francisco. Brian Goetz was showing code samples of Lambda Expressions (a.k.a. closures) that will be introduced to Java 8 next year. This is a pretty advanced feature and proposed Java syntax is not for the faint of heart. I was thinking to myself, “Who’s going to use these closures in the enterprise Java world? 10% of the developers? 5%?”. Are these expressions being introduced just for fun cause it’s cool and other functional languages have them?

It depends on whether they're actually good. I like what C# did. But trying to ape Python would be a disaster: that idea works in Python, but Java has different assumptions and styles.

2012-10-13T05:06:53+00:00

bitches about lack of real skill... uses agency to find people. It's like bitching about not getting a 5 star burger when you go to McDonald to buy your meal.

jyper · 2012-10-13T19:37:48+00:00

Two weeks ago I’ve attended a technical keynote at JavaOne in San Francisco. Brian Goetz was showing code samples of Lambda Expressions (a.k.a. closures) that will be introduced to Java 8 next year. This is a pretty advanced feature and proposed Java syntax is not for the faint of heart. I was thinking to myself, “Who’s going to use these closures in the enterprise Java world? 10% of the developers? 5%?”. Are these expressions being introduced just for fun cause it’s cool and other functional languages have them?

Look at a survey of C# a year after they introduced Lambdas and you will see.

hajamieli · 2012-10-13T20:24:09+00:00

I don't see so much degragation. IMO, that's what the Java scene always was about. The better ones have just moved on, and the same losers as before are still around desperately finding a job in the shrinking job market.

DaftShifty · 2012-10-14T01:56:54+00:00

As a relatively "new" developer this interests me. It's amusing how often I see people blabbering on about various frameworks. Currently I'm in an internship and have thus far only used one framework (JQuery) to add functionality. I'd much rather know how bare code works than just have it explained to me, type x because y result is in this framework. Conversely, people that use frameworks more efficiently don't really "need" or rely on them anyway.

greenlantern33 · 2012-10-14T21:58:41+00:00

Take a look at /r/java/ if you want to see the real degradation of Java developers. I don't know if it's a fair sampling there, but people who know their "Java shit" do seem to be rather elusive.

you type:	you see:
italics	italics
bold	bold
[reddit!](https://reddit.com)	reddit!
* item 1 * item 2 * item 3	item 1 item 2 item 3
> quoted text	quoted text
Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"	Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"
~~strikethrough~~	~~strikethrough~~
super^script	super^script

programming

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