> From my personal experience, the first example doesn't really happen: It happens every day, all day. Other developers don't see it, because it doesn't even c

> From my personal experience, the first example doesn't really happen: It happens every day, all day. Other developers don't see it, because it doesn't even compile. > I rarely see people randomly throwing annotations at methods/classes hoping one of them will stick. I see it, plenty, in other projects. I have done it, trying to work around an arbitrary 3rd party restriction. I can't get something to work and see some old SO and hope it applies. Look at the arcane combination and through trial-and-error figure out what is relevant...then work backwards. Sometimes you can figure out what's going on without a blog explaining the opaque behavior or the overly-simplistic documentation explaining what something does...or used to do or doesn't always in some specific set of conditions, mainly mine. All you have to know is every bit of how each annotation works and why, and how that interacts with every possible element of your compilation and runtime. This is the unrealistic state of "understanding" annotations for the vast majority of java developers...or maybe it's just me and everyone I work with.