Comment by herewego | Hacker News Reader

Comment by herewego | Hacker News Reader

I work for a mid-size (read: 100+ employee) IT recruiting company and I have to tell you that this boils down to one thing and one thing only for most people that have chosen .NET: economics.

If you want to be a developer and you're goal is to give your three kids a good life, drive that BMW 5 series, and own a $500k house, then you should be a .NET developer. The math is simple and I have a mountain of data that supports the reality that .NET developers get paid significantly more (20-30%) on average than any of the hot whiz-bang alternatives (Ruby, PHP, Java, etc). The average mid-level .NET developer in a dev-friendly town (san fran, boston, new york, etc) is making $80-90k, Senior $90-110k, Architects $110-130k, Director/Managers $130-160k. Those are averages that don't include bonuses. There are of course exceptions (finance industry add 20% to the above figures, start-ups subtract 10%, etc).

Never underestimate the position that money holds in ones relationship with their chosen path in life.

I think the authors argument is valid and is the reason why most of the developers that leave the .NET world do, but my observations indicate that most .NET/MS developers are lifers.

On a side note, I actively practice development in.NET, PHP, Java, and a few other languages at my 9 to 5. I like to think that I'm fairly unbiased.

Your numbers must be pretty outdated for Rails people (or maybe you don't recruit into well-paying gigs) if you think those figures are well above what we're making. I'd say most salaries are comparable to that.

And I think you're probably right for PHP and Java. The talent pool is saturated, so there's little "demand" for that sort of employee. "Oh you want $70k? Sorry, we've got 10 candidates who will take $40k. Bye!"

But outside of the markets you specify, I think the same situation exists for .NET developers. I know a good number of .NET devs who work in government contracting work and make about half what you say they should make. I know a few who work for product companies in towns other than the ones you mentioned that make about half also.

It's probably different markets, business models, but let's not act like .NET is some magical cornucopia of money that will shower you with many monetary blessings if you just sell out to it (this coming from someone who worked in .NET from its beta until right after 2.x came out).

Ruby in particular is hot right now and they're fetching higher salaries relative to other OS languages, you're correct about that. I clumped them all together in my query, and PHP (and Java to a lesser extent) pulled the average down.

Also, notice that I didn't specify junior developers on the salary scale - they're all over the place in terms of salary.

Government contract work is always the exception in any industry. I think that's a given.

Is Ruby "hot" anywhere besides the valley? I haven't seen the significant uptick in socal, but perhaps I'm missing it.

It seems to have a lot of traction in the Silicon Forest

As a counterpoint to your figures: this side of the ocean, senior Java contractors make EUR 90-100 while most .NET jobs hover around EUR 65-80.

As to why this is, I can only guess. It appears the pool of .NET developers is larger, keeping the prices down, and most jobs are at a medior level, not senior.

Interesting. I should have been more explicit - my figures are for the U.S. only.

In Malaysia, life is currently very good for .NET (and specifically C#) developers. If you have more than 3 years experience, headhunters will call/email you almost every day and try to poach you from your current company. The talent pool is not that big but demand for .NET developers is steadily increasing; and so is their median pay. It's definitely enough to be quite comfortable. As an indication, the salary of .NET developers with 5 years experience is on par with that of managers.

In general, "offshore" software companies (e.g. Monster has a dev center here) use .NET and can afford to pay well. For them it's a simple matter of currency arbitrage. Local startups, on the other hand, tend to choose PHP because PHP programmers are plentiful and inexpensive.

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