JavaOne and Stalinist Management
By Allen Holub
June 15, 2005 —
(Page 1 of 3)
The annual JavaOne conference is coming up; this year, it’s the last week in June. The conference catalog for JavaOne 2005 is actually heartening. My main complaint about all past JavaOne events, except the first couple, has been the lack of “how-to” sessions. Last year was a low point, with massive marketing hype drowning out whatever practical material was present, and there wasn’t all that much practical material. Judging by the conversations I had with other programmers, I am not alone in feeling this way. To make matters worse, the lack of practical emphasis has been an ongoing complaint amongst attendees.
This year, Sun finally seems to have taken this criticism to heart. The current catalog lists 22 hands-on lab sessions that cover everything from client-side UI programming, to security, to enterprise topics like EJB. Of the 18 sessions in the Core Platform track, eight are advanced how-to sessions and three are tutorial sessions. Most of the remaining sessions in the track seem to be the usual too-high-level-architectural and history-of-the-JSR drivel, but I’ll settle for a usefulness rating of 61 percent.
Other tracks seem equally practical in nature. It remains to be seen whether the actual conference can live up to the catalog, but I’m glad to see that Sun finally seems to get it; if you can’t come away from a technical conference of this sort knowing how to do something that you didn’t know how to do coming in, then the conference is a failure.
Changing the topic, a couple columns back (“The Terror of Code in the Wrong Hands,” May 1, page 37), I talked about the software jihadists at the far left of the bell curve. To summarize: The top 5 percent of programmers are 20 times more productive than the “average,” and the bottom 5 percent are actually destructive. When hiring, it’s difficult to distinguish the bottom 5 percent from the bottom 95 percent, though. My main point, which I didn’t make clear enough, was that the industry seems to be actively wiping out the top 5 percent through wrong-headed hiring practices and wrong-headed emphasis on specific technology.
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