In a typical Java shop or enterprise code factory, after 2-5 years you reach a plateau and the only way up is to become an "architect" or move into management.

In a typical Java shop or enterprise code factory, after 2-5 years you reach a plateau and the only way up is to become an "architect" or move into management. So that's what the better people in the mainstream Java world want to do, and ultimately the tenor is focused on "enterprise architecture" and Spring/Hibernate add-ons instead of making beautiful, powerful, or maintainable software and solving hard problems. Seems like the key word here is "typical", and you risk drawing overly broad conclusions from your own experiences and/or the "conventional wisdom" one arrives at from reading too many forums. I wonder how the software engineers who work at Google or Twitter and write applications in Java that "solve hard problems" feel about your assessment of their motives and goals.