Apparently the fellow who was brought in to fill the job I left at my previous employer has been, umm, released from duty. I met the guy once – seemed nice enough and all, but in sharing some code back and forth in my consulting work with them, some of it just wasn’t up to muster. It ranged from the trivial (what’s the purpose of “else { }”?), to the truly frightening (if (request.getParameter(“foo”) == “null”) – yes null is in quotes and == is being used for a String compare).

It’s a tough market out there to hire mid-range Java developers. From what I’ve seen. the demand is huge for sharp developers, and the supply just isn’t keeping up. Good news for us. Maybe now we can start moving away from hiring based on acronyms in a resume and regain focus on general experience and adaptability. I’ll take a sharp developer who can learn Struts, Hibernate, (insert technology here) over a mediocre developer who already knows the tech. Sharp with experience in the technologies is nice to find, but rare, and usually expensive.

So I suppose they’re probably looking for someone sharp to replace him. Drop me a note and a resume if you think you might be interested and I’ll send it along. Email is firstInitialLastName at gttx dot org.