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I have been slack in my technical leadership [blogging, audioboo recording, community output]. I know. I feel bad about it. I wonder what the future holds. It has been a frustrating time. I think many organisations lie about their needs and /or some really do not know exactly what it is they truly want as requirement. The left hand seems to be confused by the right hand or vice versa. Today I spoke to [DELETED]. It seems that the job market is a bit slow again.

Just the other day, I thought of becoming recluse, withdrawing my involvement from the Java community to an absolute minimum. I feel that the times are definitely becoming much harder, the participation into hardened group of minds a lot harder to foster, and this is my feeling again just one week after the Java Posse RoundUp 2011. What would be the grand achievement of another reclusive engineer? Bugger if I really know. I believe that I put a lot into the community from 2004 to 2010 and then the crunch came and hit me hard personally late last year. I handed out more JRebel and IntelliJ licenses that I can remember at the JAVAWUG and it was great to award the prize draws; and yet the sum total of rewards are muted. My spirit has waned. Outside of work the community went great guns. It was fantastic, I thought, to see a wealth of technologies and speakers from around the world and local to the UK. Yet inside the workplace, the so-called businesses, where I worked, the knowledge of upbeat external Java community had no traction at all. When I mention Java community, the response that I received was: “so what?”.

The great networking facility in which I originally envisaged as a way of making a job search a breeze never really appeared during the life of the JAVAWUG. It was if there, I never quite saw this vision. Instead I witness an invisible shield preventing collaboration, prevent the people from being involved with each other. It was if business had each and every single engineer’s neck down on a chopping block.

Software engineers: our self-value , our self-worth is weak, our power is weak. WE ARE WEAK AS FUCK. WE DON’T HAVE ANY MUSCLE WHATSOEVER. As software engineers we are very broken apart, split and separated from others in our field. There is no unity, there is no soul and my mind and body does not want this at all. Are we willing change it? Ruddy hell no.