"Using .net Cost Me My Job" (2020)

The headline is clickbaity of course. It wasn't .NET that was costing him his job, but working in a shitty environment with incompetent management. So essentially, he dodged a bullet.

> the developer who had implemented the function said he had heard that if/then was inefficient, so he used try/catch instead

I would love to see that function

Sorry, but this is a really terribly written story that completely skips over the critical part. One moment they decide to use .NET for a proof of concept, and the very next sentence has a consultant come in to criticize the tons of code that they have already written. One moment the author is apparently driving the team to adopt a new technology, and in the next sentence it is all someone else's fault that the team has used that technology inappropriately by writing clumsy code that goes against the paradigm. He talks about having these double-workstations set up for pair-programming sessions, and yet somehow the team (not org) culture allows a lone developer to create utterly crazy code without anybody else on the team every reviewing or sanity checking it. None of this story adds up. None of this is caused by .NET. The title should be more like "poor leadership allowing my team to shoot themselves in the foot cost me my job."

It just sounds like a case of poor management and territoriality, along with a bunch of lone wolf coders each doing their own thing, rather than the fault of any tech stack.

I wonder what they were trying to do in VB6 that was so much easier in .NET.

Just a note that this isn't me (hence the quotes), just a fascinating (and sadly relatable) story of Compaq culture in the mid 2000s.

I was a very early adopter of C#, became a bit of an evangelist consultant and introduced it with .NET into several companies with this kind of tech stack.

I had also previously worked at HP’s rival beforehand.

I’d developed a reputation (purely by chance) for migrating teams to .NET and that skill was in demand. When I would start with a new team the initial responses from developers were always the same. For VB6 and VBScript developers C# was a monumental paradigm shift.

They hated the Java style brackets. They wanted their IF’s, ELSE IF’s and END IF’s. Subroutines and functions were backwards. Everything to them felt foreign and wrong.

The truth was that many VB6 developers had come from background of VBA, working with Microsoft Access in corporate IT departments. Or they had come from classic ASP (VBScript) where you didn’t have to compile your code.

Many fought to use VB.NET instead. It felt closer to what they were used to.

However, I was convinced that C# was the future, and I’d impress this on the management teams that would hire me. Every piece of documentation Microsoft put out and every code sample they provided, pushed, promoted and prioritized C# over VB.NET and I was convinced that C# would eventually dominate VB.NET. I also believed that for the web, C# was closer to JavaScript and that had become the de facto browser scripting language, making the context switch easier for website developers.

The more they used C#, the more they loved it. Sure I came across the odd stubborn senior that refused to accept the inevitable, but critical mass and their management usually helped them along the way. In the end, the speed, structure, peers and power of .NET compared to VB6 would eventually win them over.

These days I still come across the odd old .NET Framework application written in VB.NET. Sometimes even on rare occasions a website written in classic ASP. However, they’re always legacy apps on their last legs, where there’s maybe one old programmer keeping it from falling apart and nobody else knows how to support it. Any developer with less than ten years experience probably hasn’t even seen VB.NET. At least, I’ve never seen a company start a new project in VB.NET in years. As far as I’m concerned VB.NET is a dead language now and I was proved right.

I still work in the .NET community and have watched it grow and thrive into what it is today. I never could have imagined being able to read the source code of .NET back then, but today I can. I’d never have believed .NET would run on Linux, and as a preference over Windows as well! I’d never have believed it would become one of the fastest and most performative languages either, but here we are 20+ years later.

Yes I danced with the devil that is Microsoft. I knew what I was getting into when I started, but it’s put food on the table for all these years and I don’t regret it at all. It’s been a wild ride.

I was a .NET developer for most of my early career. Only recently has a different stack replaced .NET as the one I have most YoE with.

I decided I wanted to leave the world of non-tech enterprise companies and get into a Silicon Valley style tech company for greater pay and perks. As my job search went on, I realized having .NET in my resume was a big problem. I was showered with recruiters pitching jobs at the types of companies I specifically did not want to work at - because .NET is a huge presence there.

Only after I removed every mention of .NET from my resume and LinkedIn profile did I get more focused (albeit fewer) attention from the types of companies I was interested in.

If anyone finds this relatable - I recomment watching "The Expert" on youtube.

I enjoyed reading this.

"Over the next few years, our team of five grew to 20. Four times the size does not equate to four times the productivity"

A lot of this reminds me of my first job as a software developer. My first big project, a complicated CMS web project, trying to peice together something with EVER CHANGING ideas from the client. There was a Senior developer and 2 juniors (myself included)

The senior was getting so fed up with the project, it was really me and the other dev trying to keep it together. At the time, we did not have the authority to speak up like the senior could.. so we did our best.

One day, without the senior, our manager wanted us to build a Gantt chart and see how long it would take to complete the project. We spent the whole day on it and were very proud of the flow. Everything was organised and reasonable. Our manager would look at it for a few seconds and say:- "This is really good, guys. I see the two of you believe you can get this done in 9 months. Try and slash it to two"

I looked at the other dev. We were both shocked. We spent a WHOLE DAY on this Gantt Chart yet the end date was already locked in place! What was the point doing this?

The manager would say other stupid comments, similar to the quote I covered above, that if we "could get another person on this with you, it would two weeks instead of four" type of thing. His viewpoint that, to get our gantt chart to two months, was simply to add more resources. Even a JUNIOR developer like myself at that time knew it doesn't work like that!

I couldn't help but think of various sentences from Fred Brooks' Mythical Man-Month.

This other junior dev... we went our seperate ways... but we are still in contact, and meet up a few times a year.

(looking back, I see areas I could have done better. Of course I have nearly 20 years experice as a software developer. I am just disappointed in the senior dev. I am basically his age now that he was then. As long as I am treated with respect and proof they are willing/keen, will go out of my way to help younger devs)

Why does this feel so relatable?