Disruptive technologies such as hand-held devices, cloud computing and social media are rattling the foundations upon which traditional businesses are built. Enterprise customers have grown smarter at ensuring the latest technological trends work in their favor. Everyone is trying to zero in on their core competencies by employing commodity services to run their business.

Likewise, enterprise application vendors need to zero in on their core competencies and enhance more value to the businesses of their clientele by leveraging standards-based commodity services, such as IaaS and PaaS, provided by leaders in those segments (e.g. Amazon EC2, Google Cloud Platform etc.).

What else enterprises need to do is learn to adopt new and emerging technologies such as cloud, utility and social computing to build on them to penetrate new market avenues.

New small and medium-sized entrants into the market are constantly challenging enterprises given their ability to rapidly turnaround and address the requirements of the customers in a cost-effective manner. Additionally, these new advancements also affect how enterprises create, deploy, and manage solutions and applications. If you take the example of Force.com, for instance, you find that it’s a common war zone for enterprise application vendors to furnish SME markets with their applications, with the new entrants mostly having an edge.

One of the biggest challenges in pursuing a career in software development is to figure out which language you want to work. In addition to commonly used software programming languages like C, C++, Java a lot of new programming languages such as Python, Ruby on Rails have surfaced especially because they are used by a lot of consumer based start-ups these days.

With so many front and back end languages, the choice of learning Java is a failsafe decision and mastering Java can ensure that you have a bright future in software programming.

What is Java

Java is a computer programming language that is designed to be platform independent meaning that the language can virtually run on any hardware platform. This platform independence and an object oriented framework make Java the preferred language of development especially for client-server web applications.

It’s the eternal conundrum of a hiring manager – you have to hire for every single position in the company without any first-hand experience. How to do it? If you can have a trusted programmer sit in on the interview, that’s ideal, of course. But what if you’re hiring your first programmer? Or what if you’re hiring a freelancer? Or what if company policy dictates that you’re the only person allowed to do the interviewing? Well, in that case, you need some helpful advice and your innate bullshit detector. We questioned programmers and hiring managers and compiled a list of dos and don’ts. Here are some things to ask when interviewing programmers:

Past Experience

Ask the programmer about the biggest disaster of his career so far, and how he handled it. Did he come in at midnight to fix the code? Was he unaware of the problem until someone brought it up? Did someone else handle it?  According to our programmer sources, “Anyone worth their salt has caused a major meltdown. If they say they haven’t, they’re lying. Or very, very green.” Pushing a code with bugs in it isn’t necessarily bad. Not handling it well is bad.

As usual, your biggest asset is not knowing the field, it is knowing people. Asking about career disasters can be uncomfortable, but if the interviewee is experienced and honest then she won’t have a problem telling you about it, and you will get an idea of how she handles mishaps. Even if you don’t understand what the disaster was or how it was fixed, you should be able to tell how honest she’s being and how she handles being put on the spot.