Tech skills: Does Java trump COM when looking for work?

JavaWorld forum members are talking about the future of Java and the demand for Java skills in our Careers Q&A discussion. We thought you might find some of these opinions of interest. Do your job search experiences more closely match those of “alexbu” or “sachin_vs?” Talk back in our discussion forum!

I am a 23-year-old professional working with the Java platform. Now that the market is down and the demand for Java professionals is down too, I am having second thoughts about pursuing a Java career. The trend seems to be changing to C# and .Net, and I hear most of my friends are returning from the US because they were thrown out of their Java jobs. Can anyone give me some suggestions regarding this?

I have just completed a grueling two-and-a-half-month cycle of job hunting. I am equally well versed in Java and Microsoft (COM) technologies, so I had a chance to connect to the prospective employers from both sides of the fence. I’m talking head-down, nose to the grindstone, full-time (including lots of overtime) job search activities. All along the way, I’ve been assisted by numerous friends in high places, as well as acquaintances and professional headhunters. Now that it’s over, I can tell you that it was one of the hardest things I had to do in my life.

Yes, the IT industry has fallen on hard times. Many businesses are looking for high-quality (meaning highly educated, with lots of experience and a proven track record) experts, but are reluctant to hire anyone. Almost all businesses today are stuck in what people label the “holding pattern” (the sit-and-wait attitude). What are they waiting for? Seems to me that everyone is waiting to see if there will be any change in the overall direction: will we be moving away from Web-based computing, or will this paradigm be reinforced? Regardless of what may be causing this “staffing freeze,” as one prospective employer succinctly put it, the situation reminds us of the days when everyone was putting all the IT projects on hold while frantically working on the Y2K bug.

So, what do I have to report with respect to the most/least popular technologies out there? In a nutshell, I was able to generate most leads and to provoke most in-depth interviews with my Java skills. Keep in mind that I wasn’t limiting myself to my local area, or even to the North American market. I had a number of tele-interviews with European companies, and I was also looking into the Indian and Asian markets. I was ready for a change, and would consider a high-quality job anywhere in the world.

Surprisingly few opportunities came from the Microsoft camp (despite the fact that I was advertising my COM/ASP skills aggressively). My impression is that most businesses that focus on Microsoft technology are coming from the start-up arena (and we all know how viable the start-up sector is nowadays). This actually makes sense, when you think about it — only fresh start-ups can afford to standardize on one platform, and Microsoft may make a lot of sense to many of those companies that are looking for inexpensive, inexperienced labor. Large, well-established businesses are typically marred by the hodge-podge of many incompatible technologies, and Microsoft can do absolutely nothing to help them out in that respect. Java, on the other hand, is an ideal middleware technology that sits in the middle kingdom and coordinates all those disparate technologies.

Where I did have some interviews with the prospect of working with Microsoft-based technologies, these interviews were typically of a lower caliber than the Java/Unix ones. While most Java interviews were focusing on design patterns, UML, object-oriented design and development methodologies, and business frameworks, Microsoft-based interviews were unmistakably focused on some trivial, low-level coding issues (“How would you sort this sequence? How would you compare these two sequences?”) This also makes sense, because it would be extremely rare to meet any Microsoft head who has even heard of design patterns, or who has ever used UML for doing application design. To put things more bluntly, Microsoft technologies are geared toward nonprofessional developer wannabes — typically, accountants and sales representatives who would like to change their careers and go into IT.

But please, don’t get me wrong — I’m not against Microsoft technologies. I admire Redmond’s adherence to the interfaces in COM architecture, as I believe that to be one of the most important issues. There is not much wrong with the technology, it’s just that the company is catering to the nonprofessional developers (read: cheap work force, low barrier of entry), and that’s what is putting me off. I’m not trying to sound elitist, but this cheapening of our profession is a blasphemy, like lowering the bar for the requirements for someone to become a doctor.

Finally, I don’t understand people’s concern about whether to shy away from Java in light of the impending C# threat. Your Java skills are perfectly transferable to C#, as C# is a blatant rip-off of Java in the first place. You can make the transition in a matter of hours, without missing a beat. So, even if C# someday manages to kill Java (I know, I know, an impossible event, but let’s be gallant and give it the benefit of a doubt), you would barely notice any difference.

Source: www.infoworld.com