Now that I have officially given notice at work, I wanted to take a minute to share some details of my recent job hunting experience and raise some questions that have been bothering me. A small bit of background, I have been working in software development for 13 years, during that time, I've done Web-based, desktop, and database stuff. My recent work has been focused on thick desktop clients connecting to remote databases.

When I decided that I wanted to start looking for a new job, I read hundreds of posts to determine what I felt the trends were. As with any good marketing campaign, I needed to taylor my strengths to what was in the marketplace. One of the most common types of posts were JEE-related (which is good for the state of the Java platform, I guess). They were, however, carbon copies of one another and they all came down to three things: Spring, Struts, and Hibernate. Only having, Hibernate on my resume, I received hardly any interest from these job posters. Why is that? Since when did we become tool-focused? That might matter more for newer hires, but when you're recruiting senior people shouldn't you expect them to pick up a new toolkit or API? Isn't Spring just another API? Isn't Struts? Is it the recruiters or the job posters that have forgotten that at one point, none of us new Java, let alone JEE?

Since a few of my friends and colleagues have also said similar things to me recently, I can't imagine I'm alone in thinking this. So, how do we reverse this trend? Can we even reverse it? I always thought that we, software engineers, were problem solvers. Our goals is to build a system to solve a problem. Since when has every problem had the same answer (and how long has that answer been Sprint, Struts, and Hibernate)?