Comment by thepp1983 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thepp1983 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> The average .NET developer never even tries different things like AWS or the Google Cloud, TravisCI or AppVeyor, etc. They just swallow anything which so-called MVPs and conference presenters force them down the throat, primarily Azure which is by all measures inferior to the other two and they don't even know.

I've made an account because this attitude irritates me.

1. This is patently untrue. The real reason is that a large number of developers simply have more important things to do (friends / family / children etc) than learning whatever is considered in fashion. Scott Hanselman even has a name for these developers "Dark Matter Developers".

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/DarkMatterDevelopersTheUnseen...

If you have 10 years of experience working with .NET and all the parts that normally come with it, it makes more sense to keep within the ecosystem and keep up with the changes in the tooling if you want to stay up to date. There isn't much benefit for most people to look outside of it.

I've personally got sick of things changing every 3 months and build almost everything exclusively using full fat .NET because I know it isn't going to be gutted and changed in 6 months time unlike .NET core. It has also 16 years worth of development and documentation behind it. I don't need to spend half a day trawling through stack overflow posts.

2. Most software that is built in .NET is intranet software that will never be seen by the public. It is most likely hosted in a server rack in the basement. Almost 90% of the problems when developing in these places is internal politics, poor IT infrastructure spending and abhorrent legacy code. I could probably list another hundred common problems.

> Visual Studio is littered with SQL server and Azure tools which doesn't even make sense. Either offer equal tools for all major tech or none, but this subconscious constant selling of their own tools sickens me slowly.

The whole point of VS is that you shouldn't have to go outside of the IDE very often. Thus why wouldn't Microsoft offer tight integration. If you don't want to see the tooling, remove it from your VS installation or use one of the many alternatives now (Rider, VS Code or setup your editor with Omnisharp).

I do agree that the person you replied to was unnecessarily cynical (and quite irrational -- there is nothing surprising that Microsoft pitches Microsoft services in their own products), but your reply is contradictory.

I've worked in a variety of shops, both "Microsoft" shops and non-Microsoft shops, and I would most certainly agree with the GP That Microsoft shops tend to be dominated by developers who like the comfort of just eating whatever pablum Microsoft is serving, often even if that pablum will take years longer to digest than competitive alternatives. There is, in general, a tunnel vision that profoundly limits the options available to build solutions, at substantial project cost.

And it's understandable. If you're at a Microsoft shop you aren't going to challenge the norm if your first choice is SQL Server and BizTalk and Azure, etc. It's the easy, laziest option. Occasionally it might be the best option, but that's just accidental given that the choice was predetermined.

For what value of "best?" In the majority of cases, "best" is what gets the product shipping fastest. Not memory usage, not performance, not coolness. Just getting in the hands of the guys in the warehouse who are wasting time using spreadsheets, etc. The "easy, laziest option" is what gets you from 0 to full speed first.

That's what Microsoft's core customer base cares about.

> I've worked in a variety of shops, both "Microsoft" shops and non-Microsoft shops, and I would most certainly agree with the GP That Microsoft shops tend to be dominated by developers who like the comfort of just eating whatever pablum Microsoft is serving, often even if that pablum will take years longer to digest than competitive alternatives. There is, in general, a tunnel vision that profoundly limits the options available to build solutions, at substantial project cost.

I dunno about this. The vast majority of costs in any project is contractors / staff rather than licenses.

I added up the cost of hiring 3 contractors for a month versus just buying a piece of software that did 90% of what the business needed. We were much more expensive.

> And it's understandable. If you're at a Microsoft shop you aren't going to challenge the norm if your first choice is SQL Server and BizTalk and Azure, etc. It's the easy, laziest option. Occasionally it might be the best option, but that's just accidental given that the choice was predetermined.

It is also kinda counter-productive for everyone else. If everyone knows how to do something in a particular language + IDE it makes things easy because knowledge can be shared without a steep learning curve.

e.g. I write lots of scripts using python, I mainly work in .NET shops.

I left instructions for the whole process on how to get the script to run for an adhoc support job I wrote 5 or 6 years ago. For whatever reason it broke (the db structure changed slightly). I have been in a lot of contracts since that job and it was just cheaper for them to call me up and pay me to fix the script than have one of their devs look at it.

The only reason I wrote it in python at the time was because I didn't know Powershell at the time and they said I could use what I wanted as long as it was documented.

This is a bit off-topic, but on another occasion, Scott Hanselman infamously used the term "5:01 developers" targetted at many of the same people ;)

TBH I worked in high stress environments (gambling and finance). Management didn't care that I would work to 7-8pm most evenings (9pm start) and do a few all nighters. A few times I was like 30 minutes late twice in a row I would get called in for a talk about "tardiness". I was younger at the time and I thought they would cut me a bit of slack after delivering the impossible on time!!

After a while you realise that it isn't worth the effort and just get a contract job where you earn twice as much and have none of the bullshit.

If you deliver the impossible on time, they'll just ask for the even more impossible next time...

Do you have a reference for that?

Here: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/501DevelopersFamilyAndExcitem...

I'm not sure if that is the original post.

There was a bit of backlash against it, someone even published a 5:01 Manifesto, but that site is not maintained any more :D

Scott Hanselman is a workaholic. He is also very evasive at answering questions directly if it isn't politically expedient. I have noticed this both in a few email correspondences I've personally had with him and through his comments on his website. I quite like how he explains things and I do think he is a good dude.

Hanselman is also one of those developers that can bang code out 24/7. I've met them. They can get a lot of stuff done, however there is usually someone like me that is picking up the pieces left behind.

Recently I worked with one and he banged out an MVC project, commented out all the tests I wrote after he changed the API I wrote and then went on holiday to Greece for several weeks and then was moved onto another project. Guess who had to clean up the mess ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com