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Comment by bediger | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a .NET person. Heck, I'm not even a Windows person. I found this sentence interesting:

Things like the Microsoft "professional engineer" who advises you at your invitation, and then sends e-mails behind your back to executives to inform them of his concern about the "business risks" of non-Microsoft technology choices.

That's really weird. Who finances these commissars? I mean, I've seen this sort of thing take place, but only when a two-letter consultancy was gunning to take over some director's entire department. What's in it for the commissar?

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In the .NET ecosystem, there's a number of individuals that enhance their own self-promotion by hitching their wagon completely to the Microsoft train. They present themselves as "experts" and justify high hourly rates by presenting their Microsoft sponsored credentials.

Often such folks have little in the way of open source contributions, commercial products, or shipped code that they can point to. But they've probably spoken at a number of events promoting "The Microsoft Way" and have likely been awarded a Microsoft MVP award as a result of those efforts.

In general, they get by simply by advocating the Microsoft toolchain, and moving on from consulting engagement to engagement just before they're exposed. Or they focus their consulting services on large corporate IT where even their meddling makes little difference in the grand slow scheme of things.

See this all the time. Its astounding what some of these people get away with.

This is how most mid-size traditional consulting companies work. You can switch the word Microsoft to IBM or Oracle or something else.

This is how you get referrals. Like it or not, it's business.

I realize that traditional consulting companies hitch themselves to particular vendors or sets of vendors. I was surprised that consultants would act as Party Commissars, reporting developers or groups that depart from their preferred vendor(s). I thought reporting people for deviation from a party line went out in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell.

A lot of the folks that I referred to are actually independent consultants, or switching consulting companies regularly.

That phenomenon transcends the typical consulting firm loyalty and is more of a culture around Microsoft products.

I've been developing with .NET for seven years now and I've worked with many talented .NET developers, none of whom have been dogmatic about any Microsoft technology. All have been well-versed in open-source alternatives, and the industries I've worked across: financial, media and retail, have never queried any decision to choose these over Microsoft-owned technologies when presented with sound argument. Maybe I've just been lucky.

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