Requirements

I usually ask candidates for Software Engineer positions the following questions about their project work:

How do you know when you are done?
How do you know when you have succeeded?

Server as a Text Pump

So a server gets requests from the network and these come as text. A server gives a response and these are formulated as text. The text is formatted to give it a structure. And, if you use the right formats you get to call your server an XML-RPC server, or a SOAP server, or flavor of the week. Isn't all this just the Unix Philosophy taken to the web and hammered on with an XML hammer?

And, this is the point where I start wondering why the heck so many freakin'' book get written about this. SOA should be the easiest thing in the world. Unix programs have been parsing and spewing forth text for ever why does it suddenly become so much more difficult once you put objects into the mix?

It's the frameworks. Many of these XML frameworks don't make life simpler, they make it more complex. If you're trying to do SOAP or any XML-RPC work in a Java Application Server I encourage you to look at JBoss' EJB3 product. It looks to me like EJB3 in general will save a lot of grief for SOAP-y programmers and the JBossWS API is the first implementation of this that I've found usable.

When I tried some of the WebService tricks on the Sun Application server that comes with NetBeans I sprained a nerve cluster. When I tried the same on Glassfish I lost a lobe. With JBossWS I was so shocked at how easily my EJB3 service went together I couldn't believe it. I've made EJB3 + JBossWS my default development stack for Web Services.

No job shortage here?

We've been interviewing candidates for an open Software Engineering position for the last year. It averages about one interview a month and so far we can't find qualified candidates. Some of the more frustrating candidates interview well but when you get to technical questions you can't get the feeling that they themselves are comfortable with the technical subject matter. At least once someone passed technical, got hired, and had to be "let go" because it soon became apparent that they had "studied" for the interview but had no practical experience... And had lied on their resume.

I'm really puzzled by the fresh faced BSCS who has never taken data structures. I asked him which university he attended and I have to say that if this is the quality of education at that name-brand university I'll take my employer's business elsewhere. I would expect that BSCS students would either learn theory or learn practical skills to an appreciable degree.

Where are all the qualified candidates that were complaining about jobs going to India? Could you tell me where they are? I can't find them.