what's really interesting

there's a myth, that creating products is awesome and god, while being a consultant is ass and hit-and-run. consultants are people with business degrees who don't know how to program and just want to get an mba or become managers. consultants are apparently also overpriced. and would be overpriced, even if they weren't scraped from the bottom of the barrel. one of the advertisers google selects for java related topics, talks down projects to hype up their product development openings.

I think the outputs match the inputs. generalizing either way leads to falsehoods. looking at recruitment ads for product companies for example, shows that most of them are done in worse-than-java environments, for untestable products, with specialized libraries which will completely stall your personal learning.

in consulting, you can do long-term stuff, you can do things the right way, and if it makes sense, and why wouldn't using java5, jetty and the best frameworks make sense as a whole for the customer, if you don't accept the status quo, and don't accept struts 1.2 just because you're on a multivendor team and they've always deployed struts 1.2 on top of a hollerith portal with java 1.3 and accepted the specification written during 2002 and 2003 with "this has to be customizable" written in place of the UI.

the trick then becomes, if you like programming, how to ensure the right thing is being done, while still spending enough time doing the right thing, and not making sure the right thing is being done.

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