I also tried some JEE in ~2000 and hated it. How could one accept to code in such a bloated ecosystem?
I'll admit I filtered out a lot of candidates becaused they mentioned stuff like "J2EE Engineer" on their resume, which seemed to imply strong incompatibilities with our coding style...
Fortunately not everyone in the Java community is modeled after JEE (or Maven, Spring, etc.).
Right now I work for a large European bank with Java EE and Wicket. I only touch an xml every 2 months or so. I'm not saying it's better than RoR for example in this regard, but Java EE has come a long way since people here used it, and even if it's still not your cup of tea, you should check out Play framework. I've had personal projects in .NET and I can say that there is a lot more boilerplate and spaghetti code there.
I'll admit I filtered out a lot of candidates becaused they mentioned stuff like "J2EE Engineer" on their resume, which seemed to imply strong incompatibilities with our coding style...
Fortunately not everyone in the Java community is modeled after JEE (or Maven, Spring, etc.).