We have a tradition of posting flames on the PLUG list when somebody posts a job. I must admit I have never been tempted to participate in this tradition until now. But this was just too much to resist:
"Overstock.com is looking for highly skilled Java developers to work on enterprise and web applications, and infrastructure. We value intelligence, creativity..." In my opinion the association of Java with intelligence and creativity is quite an oxymoron. I spend most of the day working on MySQL internals in C++ with the restrictions of no exceptions and no libstdc++, which makes it not quite the C++ that most people are used to, but more like C. That is when my intelligence and creativity are fully engaged. Occasionally I get to write code in Perl, Python, and PHP. Again, no complaints about intelligence and creativity. However, occasionally on a bad day there arises a need to write code in Java. That is when I feel that I am being constantly babysat, I feel like a bird in a cage. I have an idea of what kind of code will be executed on the CPU , and I feel helpless because there is no way to make it more efficient. I am being forced to be excessively verbose by the long API call names. I can never remember their exact names, and waste a lot of time constantly looking up the documentation. When something might possibly go wrong I am forced to catch an exception which is quite a bit more verbose than checking an error code. I look at the code and I have to keep scrolling back and forth to figure out what is going on as the verbosity of the API pollutes the screen space and sets the noise to signal ratio into the range that I cannot tolerate. In short, I feel like I am back in the Soviet Union where you had no freedom at the cost of no responsibility. -- Sasha Pachev Fast Running Blog. http://fastrunningblog.com Run. Blog. Improve. Repeat. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
