I am still failing to reconcile the strong fundamentals of the Java developers with their inability to design outside the container.  I view the ability to design outside the container as something every Java developer should be able to do.  During interviews, that should not be a question that should be asked at all. In fact, I never used to ask the question at all until I noticed that each time I asked a candidate a design question, they made the assumption that there should be a container, servlets and JSPs involved.  When I dug a little deeper, I made the observation that there is an unbelievably high number of highly certified Java developers who fall short when asked to design anything that is not hosted in a container.

In my opinion, Java certifications and their emphasis on particular patterns are dumbing down the Java developer.  The world of Java consulting exacerbates the problem because it rewards those who solve problems by rote.  While I have nothing against patterns or consulting, I cannot help but observe that we might be losing a generation (in dev generation years) of Java developers in much the same way we lost a good generation of developers to 4GLs at the end of the last decade. Who is going to develop the complex stuff?  Who is going to innovate? Innovative solutions to complex problems cannot be solved within the constraints of containers.