Consider to take look on http://intive-fdv.github.io/DynamicJasper/ It is more code friendly Jasper wrapper to provide reports. Plain jasper is very XML heavy and you will end in wrapping it in some template engine at some point to reduce repetition. Otherwise download the Jasper Report studio crate simple reports and play around. There are maven and gradle build plugins that compile reports during the build and then you can work with compiled versions.

Jasper by itself is not a bad technology and work quite good for designing reports.

Yes. It is much in vogue. Especially in big corps. And Big corps have no idea what they doing. A year ago I had helped couple of managers to “go back to engineering”, because org had to many managers.

The amount of people who can make code and manage is very limited. But it is very alluring from the perspective of human resource optimization for people to do both. You take decent engineer => You receive shitty miserable manager that can code something non essential. This is very sad.

Big corps are like a pythons on ketanol. They have no idea what happening but they want to grow and shit profits everywhere.

Tldr; take offer, don’t quit engineering yet, you are fine

Don’t quit engineering if you enjoy it. If you have better offer and the current ship is leaky as fuck => jump the ship. Saving the leaky ships should be very profitable if it is not => you are being heavily exploited.

I jumped the ship thrice. And one time accepted a lower payed position, just because I was quite burnout.

On the topic not using the progress and not understanding the Intenals. Understanding internal will not make you senior. Understanding what you can apply that you already know can make you senior. I remember being in a situation like yours. I thought I didn’t know Jack, but then on a newplace I seen people who were running around like a headless chickens on crack. This has given me a good understanding about what knowledge is and that applicable knowledge is the key.

Coding interviews are a decent way to screen out the false positives. Watching someone solve coding challenges gives you some assurance that they can, well, code.

Hahahahaha. If only. There is very big distinction between ability to priduce code that solves the problem and solving the problem. My personal experiense showed me that passing the coding interview and being a good Software engineer is a two different skills.

Is it possible to build XML parser in it?

If answer is yes then i will build XML parser in it.

Solving a problem you know how to solve and solved more than once is a my goto approach in learning languge or frameworks. Translation of already solved problem to the new operational model or semantic exposes a lot internal stuff and marketing double talk.

This is a lot of work and time so can not recommend it for all cases and situations.

in many cases for text docs I’d rather write them using markdown and maybe add some html styling then convert with pandoc

Yep. Exactly the case. Using the multiple instruments instead of one “specially created for this reason” programm become normal. And it become normal because the program become unpredictable in changes. All the functionality is click away, but you need to know what to click.

And as a chery on top Outlook by default uses ctrl+f to forward a message. Instead of starting search.

I wholeheartedly agree with that. Every version of Excel is massively worse than previous one. Same with the other Office products. Incremental fixes and impovements covered with unneded features and Ribbon design.

The Ribbon interface intoduction is the most obnoxious design decision that was pushed to the keyboard and mouse users. It only helps “touch” or “pen” users and only marginally.

Then OneDrive aka “we holding your data ransom” Drive. This is the only one Drive that is purelly sheit.

Which OOP? Alan Kay meant this:

OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I’m not aware of them.

But there is also various other OOP around. And those really about completly different things.

And sadly one more font I will never be able to use due to missing support of non-latin characters.

Sadly some features are nice.