curunir's Journal: Are there any competent Java developers anywhere???

Seriously???

We've had a job rec out for months now and all we get a are a steady stream of purely fictional resumes. We've yet to find one person who comes close to passing the initial phone screen. Our phone screen is a complete joke too...we only asking simple questions like, "What's the difference between a Set and a List." I swear my 8-year-old nephew would do better than almost everyone we've talked to so far (he's bright and I showed him the basics of Java, but that's still pretty sad).

I would think that our job description would sound pretty appealing...we use Spring, TDD and an agile process which makes everyone's life much easier. We've sold management on making employee learning and career development an essential metric of our success (equally weighted with hitting our milestones). And our benefits are pretty solid. Yet all we see is a steady stream of morons who'd probably have problems doing basic tech support let alone Java development.

So, I ask, what are we doing wrong? Why aren't there any competent Java devlopers even considering us?

P.S. Yes, this is a not-so-subtle means of trying to get qualified developers in the SF area to send me a resume (so if you know of any that are looking for a job, please point them towards this journal entry). However I'm also genuinely interested to hear whether anyone thinks we're doing anything wrong in our applicant search and whether others are finding it as hard to find talent.

P.P.S.

[curunir]

If anyone out there is looking for a job in the SF area, please email:

dGltQGFuZ2VscG9pbnRzLmNvbQ==

(Disguised in the interests of preventing spam, both from harvesters and applicants who don't realize that the two '=' chars are Base64 padding characters)