[PJUG Javamail] Favorite Recruiting Practices (Was: Advice on Javacertification)

[Chris Kessel/Lou Doherty]

>Your email reminds me of what it was like to look for a job around
2000-2001. 

A little, see my excepts below from a quick scan on dice.com. My point to
the OP was that rather than certification as a quick route to visibility,
he'd be better off playing buzzword bingo with some tools commonly listed in
the job postings. It's more likely to get him noticed and more likely to
help him learn concretely whereas the certification questions often feel
like Java trivia.

Here's that sampling off dice.com:

>* IntelliJ or Eclipse.
God forbid you use Jdeveloper or NetBeans :)

>o Strong background in Java, JDBC, Sockets, XML, Spring, and
Multi-threading
Ok, pretty good, all mostly general skill sets, then they throw in Spring.
Spring is neat, but as a job requirement?

>- 5+ years exp with Spring Framework
>- 5+ years exp with Hibernate
Wow!  5 years of Spring and Hibernate?  That's only going to get someone
pushing the bleeding, even hemorrhaging, edge of the tools available back
then.

>Oracle 10g 
Because programming to 9i via Java has changed light years in 10g :)

>Contractor must have experience with the following applications and tools 
>Eclipse IDE, Log4j, IIS, CVS, Cruise Control, ...
I've clipped this one short, but this is the prime example of the "job
listings I hate". Must know CVS? Must use Eclipse? Granted, it's a
contractor position, but it's a 6-month contract so a couple days learning a
new IDE isn't a big deal, and is the contractor really going to do anything
with Cruise Control? 

I'll stop now before it's a full on rant :). When I browse job adverts these
days, I toss any ad written with buzzwords and instead look for ones that
talk about concurrency, OO background, high availability experience, low
level socket experience, etc.  It's a sign to me the employer has an idea of
the core domain problems in their industry and thus is more likely to
interview you in a way that's better at figuring out if this is a match for
both you and the company.

Chris