Category: Archive

If you are a programmer working in a cubicle all day, you must watch this movie. It’s called Office Space.

End of blog.

As per Information Week’s survey, more Americans are employed in IT than at any time in the nation’s history. And Java job market is as good as it gets!

I’m a member of New York’s IT population, and being a consultant, I always watch the situation on the job market. I and can confirm that what I see here in New York goes in line with this survey. Most importantly, junior Java developers are in big demand. I’m not even talking about people with 2-3 years of experience – they are getting $70K jobs in a snap – but recruiters are after the college graduates looking for jobs. Can the job market get better than this? Nope.

About a year ago I was writing that Sarbanes-Oxley would generate lots of new IT jobs and now the Information Week’s survey confirms this. In general, the job security of any programmer is in better knowledge of business. The days when you can live happily by writing code by someone’s spec are gone. You’d better know how to write this spec yourself!

Dirt-cheap outsourcing does make people work more in America, it harms the morale of the IT shops, but it does not really takes away jobs of Java programmers who are a little better than average and are willing to work hard. Moreover, the USA is planning to increase the quota of work permits to bring more programmers into the country.

And if you want to become a Java programmer yourself and enjoy the piece of of this pie (that does not get smaller), get back to school, work hard, and enjoy your life! By the way, my next convert-into-Java Sunday class starts in June in NYC. If you live in a different geographical area, this article on corporate training may help you in finding the proper way to improve your programming skills.

The Baseline magazine has published the most stupidest ranking I’ve ever seen. They call it a 100 Smartest Companies.

A couple of more like this one, and Baseline magazine will lose their readers. You don’t have to have a Math degree, to see that based on their formula, the smartest people work in Real Estate business. What a joke. The fact that the real estate market prices are over inflated does not make their brokers smart. Tomorrow the housing market will go down, and their smartness will go down the drain.

The next Princeton JUG meeting will take place on

April 25. The topic: Developing Web Services with Eclipse and WTP.

This session is a live demo of development of the Web Services using

Eclipse and Web Tools Project.

You’ll learn the basics of what Web Services are, what are the

current standards, the role of the Eclipse software foundation and

Web Tools project. You’ll see how easy it is to build a bottom-up and

top-down web service with the help of WPT.

Presenter: Boris Minkin.

Boris is a Divisional Vice President of a major financial corporation.

He has more than 12 years of experience working in various areas of

information technology and financial services. His professional

interests are in the Internet technology, service-oriented

architecture, enterprise application architecture, multi-platform

distributedapplications, and relational database design.

He published several articles on bringing together

Eclipse/Tomcat/Struts/Hibernate/WTP

Also, free copies of JDJ magazine, book and T-Shirts raffle. Do not be late.

Pizza chewing ends at 7PM.

You can join the mailing list of the Princeton JUG at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PrincetonJUG/

In less than a month developers from around the world will gather in San Francisco at the JavaOne conference. This year to reserve your seat in the technical sessions you should use a Web based schedule builder . This weekend I decided to pick my sessions and pre-enroll. Some sessions are already fully booked, and not all sessions from the JavaOne brochure exist online. I guess, Web has more up-to-date schedule.

I have the speaker “s pass so I can attend the Java University (Monday), hands-on labs and all technical sessions divided by the following tracks: Java SE, Java EE, Java ME, Tools, Cool Stuff and BOF sessions. Before even going online, I “ve marked the sessions that looked interesting in the JavaOne brochure. This is how many sessions I’ve selected in each track:

Java University: 0
Hands-on Labs: 2
Java SE: 9
Java EE: 2
Java ME 0
Tools: 1
Cool Stuff: 0

BOF: 2 (one of them I had to pick, cause I “m presenting there)

I “m not surprised by zeros in Java ME (it “s just not my cup of tea), or in Cool Stuff (it “s not cool for me, but may be cool for someone else), or in Java University (I may still attend one of the four classes. I “ll make my selection when I know who are the instructors). But I was really surprised that I was having a hard time selecting an interesting topic in the Java EE track. I “m sure there will be some good presentations in this track, but this area is not as exciting as it used to be several years ago. I “m not too crazy about AJAX, EJB or Web Services which are represented in at least 50% of the Java EE presentations.
On the other hand, it seems that Java SE keeps evolving, and I could have selected even more sessions than I did. In the Tools track I “ll definitely attend the NetBeans session on Matisse. These guys are the talk of the town this year.

Here is another quick overview of JavaOne 2006.

I “m sure, it “s going to be a busy week. Besides sitting in the classrooms I “ll be involved in some JDJ-related activities. And most importantly, I hope to meet new interesting people at JavaOne. If you want to talk to me about anything and everything, just stop by and let “s have a chat. This is the most valuable experience for me: almost everything I know I “ve learned from people like you (plus books, plus Google of course).

See you there!

Now it’s official: as per Money Magazine survey, software engineers have the best jobs in America. And employers have a really hard time in hiring the right programmers. It’s just not their market anymore. Even junior programmers have no problems finding jobs (at least here in the greater New York area). Three years ago, if a job description lists 10 skills and you had only 9, they would not even talk to you. Today’s situation is different. If a candidate has 7 skills out of ten, the hiring managers should grab the candidate…

I wrote on interviewing Java developers a couple of years ago when the job market was not as good as it is now. But in a situation when managers just can’t find the right candidates and can’t staff their new projects, they need to apply a different technique, which I call “A second Chance “. Let me explain by example. I’ll use some topics from Java, but you can easily identify similar cases in any programming language.

“He’s a good guy, knows Java and Web applications, but he never worked with Struts. We’re going to pass on him “.

“She has many years in Java development, and even had a chance to work with Swing, but the fact that she does not know the difference between invokeLater() and invokeAndWait() is a clear sign that she is not the right person for a Swing project “.

Now tell me this, if a good Java programmer does not know Struts, how long do you think it’ll take him to learn about the Action classes and the like? A week? Two weeks?

Or how long does it take to people living in the Google era to find the difference between invokeLater() and invokeAndWait()? An hour? A day?

Do not let them go. Do not lose good people, give them a second chance. Call the job applicant after the interview, and tell him/her something like this, “Joe, I see that you have a solid knowledge of Java and understand how to develop Web applications.We’d really like to hire you, but since our project heavily relies on Struts, we want to make sure that learning Struts is not a big deal for you. Please spend a week learning Struts in your own spare time and call us. We’ll spend 15 minutes talking over the phone on this subject, and after that we may extend you an offer. ” This is simple and efficient way of bringing good people on board.

Joel Spolsky has written an excellent article on interviewing programmers. Unfortunately his technique is not always applicable in large organizations, but his message is clear: hire good people. It’s not difficult to teach a good person some programming technique, but it’s not easy to make a technical geek a good person.

And finally, if you can’t find the right person to hire as an employee, bring a consultant with specific technical skills on board. Even if it’s more expensive, it’s a short engagement, the person will do the job and leave. You don’t get married until you find the right second half, right? But looking for the one-and-only should not stop you from seeing other men/women.

In a perfect world, software developers would work only on interesting projects. But in a real life, people try to find a balance between interesting and well paid jobs. Often, the best paid jobs are the least interesting.

The job I enjoy the most is teaching software languages. I really like these moments when initially blank eyes of students (say, when I start explaining Java multi-threading) become again shiny and understanding. Students enjoy these moments as much as I do. Unfortunately, instructor-led training is not in favor these days.

During the 25 years of my software developer career, I had a chance to try and learn different things, and I do have something to say on the subject. So, what “s the problem, if you like doing it, and know how to do it, just go ahead and teach! Unfortunately I can “t. You may not like my reason, but it “s a pretty simple one: money. Instructors are not getting paid well. There is a perception that full-time instructors are people who just read slides in the classroom to a group of non-motivated developers whose employer sent them to class. Besides, there “s a catch 22 situation: full time instructors are not solving the real-world problems, while the real-world developers do not know or do not have time to teach. There “s always a compromise when professional developers teach part-time, and this is what I do now.

Being a college professor is also a nice optoin. As per Money Magazine, it’s a second best job in America.
The other interesting career to consider is Software Evangelist. These people believe in a particular software, and are traveling around trying to convince other people that this is THE software. This is a more challenging job that teaching a class with a written courseware and prepared examples. Software evangelists are usually preparing presentations themselves, and they are facing larger crowds of developers, which makes it more “dangerous rdquo; environment to be in, comparing to classrooms. You really need to know what you “re talking about. The audience won “t take any BS from you. This career is something that I “m still considering, but for now, I “ll keep my day job, hoping that the day will come hellip; If you “ve been evangelizing some software, please share you experience: pros and cons.

No, it’s not the weather. Both cities have hot items for sale.

If you are vacationing in Miami Beach and participate in a conversation with at least two other people, most likely

a) one of these people is a real-estate broker

b) the topic is the skyrocketing prices of the waterfront properties

The prices are over the roof, and an apartment that you could have bought for $200K five years ago, costs $800K today. It’s the same apartment, without any visible improvements, just the price is a lot higher, because people are willing to pay this price.

Bangalore is an IT outsourcing capital of the world, and it also has a very hot item for sale: consulting companies, which most likely will be the hottest item of this Christmas season. But you have to start your early to secure delivery by December 25.

Yesterday, I’ve received my copy of the Information Week magazine which had an article about EDS offering $380 million to aquire a 52% stake in Mphasis, a Bangalore outsourcing firm. What I do not get is the following: Mphasis has 11 thousand employees and the last year’s revenues is $173.3 million. Let me pull up my calculator: each employee generates less than $16K a year in revenues. Not too impressive, is it? But Mphasis stakeholders did not OK’d the deal yet: they might ask for more money. Why not? It’s the right time and the right place to be.

I also work for a consulting company (but in the USA), which is A LOT smaller than Mphasis, but our revenues are higher. But as far as I know, buyers are not lining up in front of our headquarters with bags of cash. So why EDS is ready to pay this unreasonable amount of money for a clearly non-efficient business? They do it for the same reason why people buy apartments in Miami Beach: having a Bangalore mailing address with several thousands of developers in the building just makes you look big and important. Who cares that 80% of these people are not bread winners! Actually people who know do care. That’s why our company keeps growing leaps and bounds here in the USA, and I’m sure some day it’ll be acquired by some larger firm, but the price of this acquisition will be reasonable , and no one will just throw tons of cash at us.

I agree, business has to be driven by the market supply and demand. But at least do not tell us that outsourcing is dirt cheap and does your body good.

Here’s a quote from one of the recent posts in a Java-related mailing list:

The author writes, “Regarding OS’s as development environments, let’s not forget that there

are ways to make each OS behave (to varying degrees) like others. Of the three great western religions (Linux, Mac, and Windows), Windows is IMO by far the worst for development in terms of productivity. If I have to use it, I use cygwin to provide a Unix-like environment for it. Nevertheless, this only partially mitigates the one-arm-tied-behind-my-back-and-one-leg-in-a-cast misery. ”

I’m sure, my response will offend some of respectful Linux/Unix/OSX followers, but I’d like to separate environments that you (a.k.a professional programmer) like from environments that put bread on your table. I’m talking about programmers working in a corporate world. It’s so easy to bash Windows, but do not forget that it’s mainly because of Windows, computers are so widely used in the industry, and every morning you have a have a place to go, and every two weeks your check comes in the mail.

The author writes, “If I have to use it… “. Just put the money where your mouth is. Have guts to reject using Windows at work. I’ve seen such a guy once. This programmer brought to work his personal Apple computer with a large white monitor.The management tried to force this Java programmer using a wintel PC, but they’ve lost this battle. I do not think this Apple lover was right, but at least he stood up for his believes.

Windows is user-friendly-enough and has a HUGE number of tools/compilers/servers/games etc., and neither Linux nor Mac are even close to offering such a variety. Sure, Apple notebooks look cool, and several times I was thinking of buying one for myself, but as a professional Java developer, I just could not justify spending $2-3K for this computer.

I understand why Sarah Jessica Parker (Sex in The City) types her column sharing the bed with an Apple notebook, but using Windows just make my today’s life easier. This may change though, as soon as I start living as/with Sarah 🙂

My son is a college student majoring in Animation. When I had to purchase a PC for him, I was sure that he’d want a product from Apple since they mostly use Apple computers in their school labs. But he asked me to purchase a Wintel PC cause even in this field, Windows had all required software, plus more…

As of 2006, Windows on the desktop is far ahead comparing to Linux and Mac. On the server side though, I’m 100% for Linux/Unix. Some people say “who cares ” when the hear the news of delaying the Vista release. Honestly, this release is not too important for me either. But at least give Microsoft a credit for trying to release a quality product, instead of delivering a premature baby and trying to fix the first impression afterward.

Now the funny part. I regularly read Alan Holub’s Java column at SD Times, and this time he put a smile on my face by providing some notes from a talk on retiring Windows by Bill Gates. My only complain is that this article is a bit too long. After the first two paragraphs, majority of the readers should have realized that this is an April Fool’s joke, but Alan keeps milking this idea for a little bit too long. But I enjoyed this read anyway.

Having said all this, most likely I’ll purchase an Apple notebook soon, not because it looks cool, but because now it’s built on the Intel chip, which will let me booting either Windows or Tiger OS.

IMO, there are several groups of people using desktop PC:

1. Professional programmers working for corporations

2. Professional or amature programmers working for fun on future killer apps in their basements.

3. Professional programmers working for startups or small businesses

4. Users that consume products created by professional programmers (most of them do need anything other than MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint).

5. People of artisitic nature that do not have to work, but they just “create stuff ” on their PCs because they are bored

6. Students

7. Kids

Did I miss anyone? Today, vast majority of these groups is using Windows, which has lots of issues (the adware is the most annoying one), but there is already a generation of people who’ve learned to read, write and use Windows at the same time.

I’m not selling Windows here, but I’m a pragmatic person and need a very good reason to install any other OS on my laptop. I just do not have time for this.

I religiously go to see Michelangelo every six weeks. I’m a changed person after these visits.

Marella Michelangelo is and old Italian barber. He owns a barbershop in the bus terminal in Manhattan.

Mr. Michelangelo remembers every client and how do they like their hair to be cut. We do not talk much. He goes, “Number four as usual? “. I say, “Yes, please “. Twenty minutes later I pay $13 for the job and leave $3 tips.

My wife complains that he always removes a little bit too much hair on my right side. She say, “Please, next time you go there, ask him to leave more hairs there “. But I won’t tell him this. Why? BECAUSE YOU DO NOT TELL MICHELANGELO HOW TO DO HIS JOB!