Being interchangeable part - survival guide

Lemma:
Employers much prefer that workers be fungible, rather than maximally productive

Proof:
Java Enterprise (J2EE) and UML.
The good parts: standards (Hibernate, Servlets), deployments, security, runtime environment (JVM, app servers), maven. They make it easy to program.
The bad: Bloat of the code, static typing, Eclipse (slowness!), need to reaload classes while developing, UML instead of talking to your team. This makes us inefficient and slows us down.

Static typing creates an well-selling illusion of easy finding the way in the code. Object oriented programming/J2EE methodology and static typing turns 66% of programmer's day into of text generating mini-game (with comming up with cool class name being the fun part). Having to compile and reload the code wastes another 10%. Add 4% for coffee and frustration from slowness of tools... This leaves 20% of time to programm. No wonder that it takes several months to finish simple projects.

Why companies are pushing such ineffective technologies?

Labor cost is highest position in almost any company's budget. But it still obviously pays for them for you to be ineffective. Why? Because with java you are an interchangeable part of the system (just like an object implementtion). Ability to replace you makes your wage drop and makes you easier (more obedient) and cheaper to manage (with poor management).

We all fear the change. Knowing that we are easly expendable and totally unrelevant make us care for our job and put up with unreasonable requirements, methodologies and bad management.

Effectiveness distinguishes programmers from each other, it's our value and currency. By making our main asset irrelevant, Java (J2EE) hurts our souls and sips off our energy turing us into bland Eclipse operators.

How can we earn respect?

To break free, we need to go from irrelevant to being importand and catually appreciated for not being easly replacable.

How to break free: jedi

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• Become relevant by being technicaly perfect. Know alot. Bring cool new toys to development. Learn new things afterwork. Write blog, do opensource
• Promote new technologies. Unknown terrain is an opportunity to show off your skills.
• Write some software for company-wide use - it makes you seem less expendable. As a bonus, try to please your coworkers with clean, easy syntax or even nice DSL
• Become part of usual landscape, be last one that comes in mind when staff reductions are near. Do some maintenance tasks that no one likes. Take care of fields no one wants to touch.
• When you learn something at the expense of your current employee, stay with him till it's obvious it was worth it to invest. This might help creating better environment for all of us. Do however find other job if someone takes advantage of your passion and honesty.
• Ask for code reviews and technical appreciation of your work. Treat it as part of your salary and be proud of praises. Remember to ask for position change when new duties come along. This costs employer very little, but makes you feel much better. Also writting new position in contract makes you more valuable and relatively less expendable.
• If you are not appreciated technicaly, but know you do good work, find siths around you
• Consider switchin career to Ruby
• Consider switchin career to Python
• Consider switchin career to Scala
• Consider working for small company where technical team members do specialise and trust is the binding
• Consider working in fast-paced environments, that take requirements from marketing not IT, have ambitious deadlines and is properly, competently and honestly managed.

How to break free: the dark side

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• Reinvent as much wheels as possible - custom solutions instead of well renown working ones. Effectively go away from java to 'my way of thinking'.
• Go along Java bloat. Promote extensive unit testing, insist on using CMMI and/or bloated project management methodologies (PMI, Prince2). Use UML. Complicate database schemas.
• Help lazy managers do the bad job. They are your best advocates in hard times.
• Loudly preach good practices but don't follow your advice. Backstab and sucker-puch anyone that naively proposes something long-term sane, but more costly than dirty, bad hacks. You will become immediate treasure for your employer.
• If you are medicore programmer or choosen programming career for money only, promote everything that slows work down. This gives you easy way to compete agains passionates (it frustrates them to start with). You also have passions that need the money - why would they take what you deserve?
• Try locking company in your unique knowledge or abilities. If you have none, create an illusion that you do by learning something unpopular (ex: LISP or Perl).
• Write or introduce software that seems brilliant speedup but actually hinders development. Example: software for class reloading and classes cached so that they actually often won't reload. Have explanation for every quirky case at hand - become competent in promoting that software.
• Use years of experience and CS degree as arguments in discussions against others. Always agree with those with higher experience. Do not let self-tought barbarians gain any points or fields.
• Help survice stone-age standards and solutions. Cunny enterprises only work with them, because it's cheap to buy programmers to do what everyone is already doing. Helping management promotes you.
• Help kick out of the company every naive programmer that says it loud that bad things happen. Marginalize rebeliants. Kill all jedi.

Examples and inspirations:

• Writting your own OR/Mapping with one well-selling feature that JPA doesn't have. Make sure it changes the way standard-users think about schema.
• Suggesting use of LISP by selling on it's famous effectiveness and than wrapping it up so that it actually slows work down.
• Sell in Clojure language (LISP for JVM) to be used (promotes you!) and forbidd anyone (but you!) to write macros. A perfect career cheat.
• Insisting that beacause of security reasons (try something that kicked company's butt before, like XSS) all programmers must suffer quirky, undocumented, intentionaly badly written (by you) wrapups for every function in the code. Again, become unquestionable expert at solving issues there.
• Oppose Agile methodologies at all costs and the same time promoting Java. Agile with java requires inhuman ability to write modular, clean code with no assumptions of future use. If you'd ever like Agile, switch language :)
• Support your boss helping to survive old methodologies by finding or making up costs of dropping it. He will love for that.
• Promote using in-code caches instead of external ones (like memcached). Cache is a root of all evil and creates alot of hard work.
• Quickly assasionate everyone mentioning names of: Varnish, Scala or Play Framework
• Do promote TDD methodology. It makes you seem enterprise-team-member (again, less expendable) and slows down work for the whole team. More time for coffe, less deadlines. More opportunities to write bad, proprietary locking-in solutions.
• Remeber, you need to seem relatively (to your colegues) less expendable. Bring some bad things to development and sell it as importand innovations.
• If company happen to invest in you or you learn something new, immediately apply for new job and ask for bigger salary. It works, because your current company paid alot of money for your education and next company just uses that knowledge. Repeat -> profit!

Dark side is easier, but it eats your soul. Think carefuly what shade of gray are your doings...