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Comment by CyanLite2 | Hacker News Reader

There's an overwhelming majority of developers who recently majored in CompSci or went to Bootcamps that have never touched a Microsoft development ecosystem, let alone Windows before. Schools/Camps are mostly teaching Python, JavaScript, or Java although that's starting to change now with .NET Core being open-source and cross platform and being one of the fastest frameworks out there on TechEmPower Benchmarks.

I founded a startup on the Microsoft tech stack (.NET Core, VSTS, and Azure). Why? It's an incredibly productive dev/tooling environment that Java/Python/AWS doesn't even come close to. The downside? It's really hard to find good C# talent that isn't stuck in an enterprise development mindset.

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> It's really hard to find good C# talent that isn't stuck in an enterprise development mindset.

That's also the reason I avoid Java personally, I find the language alright but the community around is kind of "enterprise" focused.

The flipside is also true; as a C# / MS stack focused developer myself, it's quite difficult to find satisfying work that isn't enterprisey, and it seems to be mostly because Microsoft isn't Cool.

The cost is something too. I enjoy developing in the Microsoft environment, but by using Microsoft you actually have to pay for your tools.

Like in other professions! What a strange thing!

I enjoy being paid to develop software, so I also want the producers of my tools to be able to pay for their bills.

I wonder how may that use FOSS on their business actually pay/donate anything, even a penny, to the developers.

My experience consulting says pretty much no one.

When I started work engineers has $10k RISC workstations and $50k/year in software licences, we did external training regularly. We were expensive, and mgmt were loathe to waste our time on crud because of that, and because we delivered. Now they talk about cloud synergies and ITIL processes and outsourcing and tech partnerships -- tech costs WAY MORE but devs/engineers aren't seen as delivering value. No one pays anything for the open source that makes it all work. It's enough to make you want to run away and join a startup.

The only thing "cool about a company is that they deposit money into my account every two weeks. I don't look for "cool" jobs.

Do you like your work boring?

After developing professionally for over 20 years and as a hobbyist for 10 years before that, there is nothing "exciting" about software development. I don't hate my job or my career by any means, but at the end of the day, it just funds my lifestyle.

That's fine, but plenty of us choose to work on systems we find intrinsically interesting and/or on problems we consider important. Sometimes that comes with a financial penalty. Personally, I'm happy to get slightly less money in exchange for more interesting and meaningful work.

> It’s really hard to find good C# talent that isn’t stuck in an enterprise development mindset.

I’ve found that C# devs manage quite well in F#, and the ergonomic way of doing things is sufficiently different to break people out of the 3+ levels of inheritance I’ve seen some small C# projects devolve into.

That said, the community is smaller.

> It's an incredibly productive dev/tooling environment that Java/Python/AWS doesn't even come close to

Could you tell me what the Windows/C# stack has that the aforementioned stacks don't?

There is some really excellent tooling that is available for .Net that I haven't been able to find real equivalents for other languages. You have to pay for it with money, rather than with time and aggravation, however.

Microsoft-centric devs seem, on the average, to be less averse to paying for software tools than your average Python/Java/JS dev.

"There is some really excellent tooling that is available for .Net that I haven't been able to find real equivalents for other languages."

Care to give some examples? I keep hearing this, but I don't see those awesome tools when working on .NET projects.

Visual Studio is really unmatched, with all of the things that it can do. I still use Resharper and a few other plugins to tweak things out just the way I like them. You could do all this with a customized vim or emacs or whatever editor, but the learning curve is much lower. And while visual UI editors tend to be a trainwreck, the VS ones are about the best.

RedGate makes a really nice .net performance and memory profiler. One of the things I haven't seen elsewhere that it does is being able to drill through any ORM libraries to see the SQL that is being generated and executed against your databases.

LinqPad is a REPL, but it does intellisense, Nuget integration, rich output options.

It's generally just a little bit more finish and usability than OSS options

It's a statically typed language meaning it's much easier to refactor using guaranteed safe automated refactors and there is a whole class of errors that will be caught by the compiler (unlike Python) and its overseen by a competent company (unlike Java)

Having recently finished university, we needed to use C, xC, C++, JavaScript, Java, Python and Haskell. Nothing Microsoft there at all.

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