> I don't think they have any intention of climbing the management ladder because they didn't after two years
> I, arel, am in a good position to judge the quality of my previous coworkes, and they have all been fantastic!
Well, 'arel', first of all thank you for your useful contribution to hacker news.
Second of all, if in all of your 10 years in various companies (you also sound like you have been doing Java only, so this applies doubly so) you have never maintained any shitty Java code from a shitty Java programmer, well, you must either have been very lucky, or you must be one of them, don't you?
Some background just for you my friend: I've seriously programmed in (in order) C, C++, assembly, Java, Ruby and Python... and many other languages in between.
I've had to maintain, fix, performance optimise, make sense of badly written code in C, C++, assembly, Java, Ruby and Python.
Stop looking to demonise one set of developers and you will see that poorly written code and stupidity is everywhere, I can certainly see that.
Also thank you for creating an account just to reply to me. I'm honoured.