I agree that there is a Java culture, but I also think that it developed into the way it is because it was so popular during a time when there werent very good

I agree that there is a Java culture, but I also think that it developed into the way it is because it was so popular during a time when there werent very good engineering practices by non-technical people. The movement towards wanting managers with a technical background I think is fairly recent. The majority mass of java developers now probably "grew up" in the jaded horror story environments we seek to avoid. Also, i think new grads tend to only know how to make things dry via abstraction (not considering the trade offs) and b/c of javas popularity and oop as a buzzword, always did it via inheritance.