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Comment by nestlequ1k | Hacker News Reader

This will be an interesting one to watch. I know a ton of great .NET developers who have bailed on the platform and switched to open source. This is anecdotal for sure, but if this is a huge trend then you're left with a bunch of companies with huge investments in a platform, and an ever decreasing number of developers who can actually code effectively for it. The salariesrates should go up, but these typical corporate .NET clients are cheap motherfuckers. I'd predict a resurgence of offshore consulting to meet demand.

However it does seem like devs for every technology are in high demand and low supply. It could just be as simple as that.

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I'm a .NET fanboy, but the likelihood of me ever working for a .NET shop is next to nil. The work is just not interesting. Sure, if I just wanted to collect a (almost decent) paycheck, I'd do it, but given that there are a dozen other niches I can work in, I'll pick any of them over the .NET world. The only way I'd be converted is a massive paycheck and at least some interesting problems, but neither of those seem to exist in the .NET world, by and large.

I'm on the other side of the fence: At my last place we actually had some moderately interesting problems to solve, but had a hard time hiring because the vast majority of the applicant pool couldn't do anything that they couldn't look up on Google or StackOverflow.

Even with a moderately easy tech-screening process we could only realistically do second interviews with around 1.5% of the applicants we got. For as good as .net is, I think it's doomed to be relegated to accounting apps for the foreseeable future.

Amen. I got lucky- I'm a .NET developer now working for a small startup in NYC, but spent a long time in .NET shop hell.

That said, we're starting to look for another developer, and it's a nightmare. So many resumes of people that (without wanting to sound rude) belong in a .NET shop- I interviewed one guy that didn't even know SQL, because all he'd ever done was use prebuild factory methods for database access. He had a Masters.

untog, if you see this, could you drop me a line? Email should be in profile. I'm a .NET developer in NYC and may be looking to make a move. And I know SQL :)

Add me to the chorus of .NET devs saying that many of the .NET jobs out there just aren't interesting.

I'm lucky enough to work for one of the few .NET shops where I'm not just stuck pumping out commodity CRUD apps but the market looks pretty bleak.

The 2 .NET shops I was in had a pretty bad way of commoditizing the developers working there (and thus started believing offshoring was the way in this, the year of our lord, 2011).

This also led to them working in bringing the code to the lowest common denominator level and was a frustrating nightmare. I was a lone wolf and when I mentioned that I had implemented a couple systems using MVC and jQuery on the front end it blew some of the developer's minds. It's a shame because the framework is capable of a lot, it's just the enterprise shops are terrible of taking advantage of it.

Needless to say, I'm not a .NET developer anymore.

out of interest, what language/framework are you working with now?

I switched to doing a lot of Flex/Flash/Actionscript and JavaScript related work. I was basically working along the entire stack when I was doing .NET work.

I doubt that is the case. With employment at record highs and good jobs not available I don't think people would rather sit idle than take up a job in .Net. The article can also be rephrased as "Demand for .Net developers surges." Of course it won't be as newsworthy then :)

Sure, there's always going to be a mountain of job applicants for each position, it doesn't mean they can do the job. Finding qualified .NET developers is the real challenge, someone who can architect and build a functional system.

These are the very type of people who are bailing on the platform.

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