Comment by umjames | Hacker News Reader

Comment by umjames | Hacker News Reader

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> There isn’t a shortage of developers and designers. There’s a surplus of founders.

This is especially true of non-tech companies looking to hire quality people for positions in their IT departments.

I currently work in such an IT department and we have a position for a J2EE developer to write portlets for our up-and-coming Liferay portal. Needless to say, we can't find anyone good (outside of recruiters, which we'd rather not use) to fill this position. My boss has asked each of us if we know anyone we can recommend for this position. As far as I know, no such luck.

Personally, I'm not the least surprised. None of the developers that I know would even touch a job like this. Most don't/won't do J2EE. Portals never really took off like corporate America hoped it would (and Gartner said it would). I have some things that I'm working on on the side, and if/when that becomes something, I'll be headed out the door too.

What my employer fails to understand is that they are hiring as if it was still 1998. Developers now have options and no longer have to settle for jobs like this. Their competition is no longer other IT departments, it's freedom of choice itself.

So what's the answer when jobs like this need to get done?

It may not have to be J2EE, but there are plenty of corporate jobs that have to get done to help build big company infrastructure, and if much of the talent that was available now has more attractive options, is the only answer to escalate salaries? Or to hire in shorter-term contract developers?

Well, if good engineers don't want anything to do with your opening at the compensation you're offering... increase the compensation.

And, honestly, change the position so that the person hired isn't considered just a cog in management's plans, who's expected to be on call 24/7 and to put in 50 hours a week in a windowless room. I wouldn't go back to that shit even at double my current salary.

Agreed. The reason people put up with soul crushing jobs like investment banking is because the compensation makes up for it. Granted, most people in those kind of jobs burn out after a few years, but you anticipate that when taking the job. I have several friends doing the "make tons of cash while young, move to easier job in 5 years" career choice.

Corporate America IT jobs have all the soul crushing without the reward.

It's not really burn out, it's the management cabal that likes to keep the body count high. There's a lot of mildly desperate people who really forced their way up into unstable career positions, and natural genocidal tendencies peek out every now and then. It's innate human behavior. History's purges were not by accident.

"Portals never really took off like corporate America hoped it would"

Depends what you mean by a portal, but Microsoft's SharePoint seems awfully popular from what I can see.

By portals, I mean enterprise portals (like Liferay, JBoss Portal, Apache Jetspeed, etc.).

The biggest problem with them is that the "applications" or "portlets" that occupy its pages we're really meant for dashboard-like information. Just show the most relevant information in a small space on the page. If you want more detail and functionality, you should be able to click on something and be taken to a full-blown website.

In reality, IT managers here the word "applications", and they then try to cram the full web app into the portlet. So now you're stuck trying to provide web app functionality in an environment where the only programmatic links you can generate are to yourself, you have no ability to control what other things are going to be on the same page as your app. Forget being able to set HTTP caching headers, since you aren't in control of the page.

Looks awfully like SharePoint (minus the open standards, of course), Liferay even sell themselves as:

"The Best of WebSphere® and SharePoint® in One Solution"

A lot of these Java-based portals have plenty of open standards. A lot of JSR-### compliance.

From my perspective as a developer, I don't use the document sharing or publishing features of Liferay. My focus is on the portlet development. This means JSR-168 and JSR-286 portlet APIs.

I know nothing about SharePoint, so I can't really compare the two. I just know that I really dislike Java portlet development, and am ready to never have to do it again.

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