Yakov Fain

During the last two months I’ve interviewed a number of senior Java developers for a position at financial organization. Vast majority of them have 10+years experience working with Java working on real-world enterprise applications.  They have lots of interesting projects on their resumes, know how to present themselves, are self-confident, and claim the expert level of Java knowledge.

But it seems that most of them assume that just spending years working on Java projects is enough for considering themselves Java experts. The fact that you’ve been using Hibernate, Spring, JMS, and some caching framework doesn’t make you a Java expert. Over the years you might have improved your understanding of the architecture of Java EE applications, but this doesn’t not make you a Java expert.  

Back in 2004, Java 1.5 has been released. Besides generics and annotations it introduced the library of classes supporting concurrency. I don’t care if you know generics, but this library is golden, especially for Java developers who are applying for working on financial applications. Many of these Java veterans never bothered looking into Java features for years. And if I’m asking any concurrency-related question, a typical answer is “Oh yes, I remember there were some new classes that can do this.” Some new classes? Come on, they were in Java since September of 2004!

If a job applicant believes that the only ways to create a Java thread are extending a Thread or implementing Runnable, he's not a senior Java developer regardless of how many years he spent working on Java projects. This tells me that this person doesn't care about Java and is not interested in keeping his technical skills current.  

This is one of these “less is more” situation. People who have learned Java after 2004 are more likely to know it better. My message to Java veterans is simple, “If you want to compete with young kinds, spend some time learning Java programming. Become competitive as you were ten years ago.  Otherwise your only option is to complain about the outsourcing that may take away your job any day.”