lets hope 404 doesn't lead to 501!!!

so I am coming to the end of my service at my current company, not through choice, but due to being made redundant. The annoying thing is that this has nothing to do with the economic downturn its due to a merger announced about a year or so ago. The problem that I now have is that I am being put out on the street at the worst possible time to look for work. I have asked a few agents how this is effecting them, and it would seem that agents themselves are being made to do some actual work in order to earn a buck. No longer are companies accepting candidates that can barely spell JMS and have no concept of OO principles at a practical level, they are actually having to probe the people they find have stunning CV's only to discover that a large percentage simply lie on their CV!! I recently spoke to one guy that seemed a bit surprised that he could carry out a conversation with me on a technical level and it was him that had to admit first that I'd already surpassed his level of knowledge. This got me to thinking, shouldn't this have been the way it worked all along. I mean, I always intended to get into system development I started programming at 7 on the old BBC Micro then C64 I used a trs-80 and VIC20 then PC's e.t.c. and at each stage I learnt more and tried to better myself always. So I continued this attitude through university then on into the commercial sector always working out new ways to do things and just trying to be the best. However time in different companies has taught me one thing, almost no other developers have the same idea as me they simply are there to make money by lying about what they do on their CV and bungling their way through a solution one hack at a time. This is also true of contractors, although I have to admit there is a much greater proportion of those that know what they are doing to those that don't but I have still met some terrible stinkers when it comes to development. I recently moved some projects from using maven and continuum (backwards in my view) to using ant and cruisecontrol....don't ask I realise its devolution rather than evolution. The code that I was looking at looked like a series of hacks made by an unskilled school child, using member variables in servlets, having public member variables that are altered by lots of other classes in other packages, it was a mess. The author of this code was someone who was quite senior and most people generally agreed that he was good --- how on Earth do people get to these positions. The Answer; The simple answer is that the people who are for the most part responsible for hiring and firing of developers don't understand the systems these people make so just blindly trust what these people tell them, this means someone who is (for want of a better word) crap at the job they are hired to do, they are actually incredibly good at the bullshit game can go far. If these people were actually told the fact that a poorly written system costs so much more to support, so much more to maintain and is almost impossible to adapt to change then they would have trusted code reviewers that would more than likely fire idiots quickly. I have seen one contractor, whom I fully respect for being very very good at their job, stand up and say this about someone on a team to a project manager and it worked.