[buug] Absurd job posting?

[Jon McClintock]

Heh... I know of J2EE, and a couple of coworkers have written some trivia apps
to run on some cell phones with J2ME capability, but I wouldn't call myself
an expert. That would invite people to ask me to do Java development, which I
am loathe to do. :)

As far as the job requirements, I find it amusing, especially since J2EE was
a new thing back at JavaOne in 1999; they were selling Palm V's at fire sale
rates ($199) to demonstrate the J2ME VM. HotSpot was a new thing, and high
availabililty Java was an oxymoron.

The company I was working for (one of the Big 6, that recently spun off their
IT consulting division), had just implemented a brand new time tracking system
for all 30,000 consultants. The pages were served by a farm of IIS machines,
with some big Sun iron running the back end, using J2EE and Oracle (I believe
they had 6 E10ks, with 6 more ready to roll out). I got called in because they
were having problems with the backend servers crashing.

After looking at things for a while (and flying out to New Jersey *shudder*),
we observed a couple things: 1) it would die about 20 minutes after the 
biweekly load spike and 2) the "load spike" really peaked at 1 transaction
per second. That's right. The server was dying during garbage collection, 
after handling what amounts to a piddling amount of transactions.

And then there was the one and only customer contract I worked on during
my tenure. It was a fleet management system for a large shipping container
company. They had spend about a year and a half on the design by the time
I got there. We were _just_ starting the first hints of implementation, while
they went and scrapped the design and started again. I forget the J2EE 
implementation we were using, but it was quite immature. We met with the 
company, and they basically asked us which features were "really important"
so that they could get all the bugs worked out in those parts first.

After 8 months of dealing with that crappy software, and dealing with the
politics of trying to get off that project, I quit the company. My life
is much happier now. "Java free is the way to be..."

Remember, this was back in '99. I'd be very suprised if they could find anyone
with 4-5 years of Java server experience, given that back in '97-'98, the
Java language itself was still a moving target.

*sigh* Rant mode off. It's noon already? Where did the time go?

-Jon

On Fri, May 03, 2002 at 11:54:18AM -0400, Nick Sophinos wrote:
> Per our discussion last night unrealistic job postings, this one struck me
> as
> odd.  John - as an embedded C developer, are you also a J2EE expert (seeing
> that
> the two disiplines are so closely related)?
> 
> See below (from Monster):
> 
> 
> US-CA-San Jose-J2EE/Embedded Engineer
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> ----
> 
>     We are a high-speed broadband Internet development company.
> We are currently searching for a J2EE developer with a background in
> Embedded development.
> The right person will have a strong J2EE with 4-5 years of high availability
> Java development.
>  Must also have about 10 years of experience in Embedded C/C++ development.
> The ability to
> develop at both the application level and the embedded level is required.
> 
> 
> 
> - Nick
> 
> 
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