While trying to understand what kind of company I would like to work for next I made another observation on employers in the Java land. At first glance they fall into three categories:
- Typical Java shops doing something of little interest from the engineering point of view. Their job descriptions usually mention Spring and Hibernate. Frequently they also ask for either JEE or presentation tier technologies a-la JSP/Struts (IMO the latter is a particularly strong indicator you do not want to work for them).
- Companies working on something more challenging or in more exciting domains. For me a good indicator is that they ask for more advanced/less known technologies such as Lucene, Hadoop or one of the numerous DHT implementations.
- One-of-a-kind companies, GOOG-style. They do not list any particular technologies except for Java itself. They are explicitly after what they refer to as "bright people".