I’ve Sent This Over 100 Times to Recruiters looking for .Net devs

I guess what people are saying is that red velvet is so unfashionable they'd rather get a job in a factory working green leather day in, day out, than touch it.

Aside: If programming languages were coloured jackets?

C - black leather, with studs.

C++ - black leather, with studs, on the inside.

Perl - there seem to be fourteen armholes. And seven zips. It's light blue, but in some places the paint is flaking and many other colours show through. Oh, and there is no head hole. Its wearers insist it gets things done just fine and is very flexible. Everyone looks at them weirdly.

Java - a hospital gown. The bare minimum to cover you, mostly designed around the convenience of others. You can buy a factory to make them, but the customisations don't seem to make any difference.

Python - A comfortable denim jacket of average size. It is straightforward to put on. Most people say it fits them perfectly, although a few people say it chafes.

Ruby - every time you move this jacket, it changes slightly. Putting your arms into the sleeves causes new sleeves that would fit better to appear underneath the existing ones. If you tap it, you inexplicable end up with two jackets.

Haskell - a large tartan straitjacket. When you try to put it on, you find yourself in a new jacket, and the original jacket is still in the wardrobe. The jackets are connected by an unbreakable thread of modal. When you take it off, you find yourself looking at yourself still wearing the jacket. You are connected to your other self by a thread of modal. Allegedly you can do anything without errors whilst wearing a Haskell jacket; you suspect the wearers are simply crazy.

Go - A tweed blazer with leather arm patches. It can be split into multiple gackets, which can be worn by multiple people. When wearing your gacket, you can communicate with anyone in another of your gackets, but only one of you can move at once.

C# - part of a family of colourful jackets. The fit well, and are suitable for all formal occasions. However, they are not available outside the USA. Knock-offs are available in the rest of the world, but only in shades of grey.

Fortran - a powered exo-skeleton. It is old, slightly rusty, uncomfortable, unfashionable, and the wrong choice for almost all occasions. However, whilst wearing it you can run as fast as Usain Bolt.

Javascript - a quite ugly mustard yellow suit jacket. It almost looks like its been cut out of something else, a sofa possibly. If you put your hand in a pocket without declaring your intention to do so first, you find other people's stuff in your pocket, and your stuff gone. They are unreasonably popular due to a historical quirk in the law that requires you to wear one of these jackets when visiting a stranger's house.

Lisp - a bolt of woven yak wool, dyed saffron.

Clojure - a bolt of woven yak wool, dyed saffron. It also comes with some smaller pieces of wool dyed different colours, and a direct phone line to a hospital. If you read enough tutorials online, you can assemble a comfortable and useful jacket, although you often have to copy the jacket before you can modify it.

(many edits as I'm on a roll :-) )

No, it's more like:

Recruiter: "Seeking a resource to with 10+ years experience making Red Velvet Jackets"

Tailor: "I've been making Black Velvet Jackets for 10+ years. How can I help you?"

Recruiter: "Do you know anyone who does Red who might be interested? Thanks!"

Meanwhile, the tailor down the road who decided to take a couple of weeks to learn how to work with red velvet, despite his personal preference for working with silk, has filled ten orders for red velvet jackets already this week, and has an order book with a couple of hundred more waiting to be filled.

It's totally reasonable to refuse to work with technology X in favour of working with technology Y, despite the lack of demand for Y. But you can't simultaneously moan about how unfair the world is when you make that choice and then can't find as much work using Y. You knew what the situation was ahead of time.

He also seems to say, "I /can/ work with velvet, though preferably in conjunction with other materials, however I don't appreciate being referred to simply as a 'Velvet Tailor'."

Titles are tools, often used in ignorance. "[D]on’t limit our future careers by mislabeling us," OP writes. An employer's failure to titularly identify the meaningful distinction between "Problem Solver whose tool of choice is code" and ".NET Developer" has long-term ramifications for the potential employee, both inside and outside of that company's office.

The conceptual failure to distinguish between these things is common among non-technical people, including the first-round resume screeners for many companies.

I'm not an actual recruiter, was just roleplaying there; at my gig we don't really need recruiters - in fact we usually have problems with developers that they send our way (we have been forced to use them a few times to match our growth). Our best talent comes from word of mouth. I'm not sure they do a good job (for both the employer and employee) no matter what the language.

I was merely pointing out the irony in the post.

I'm not going to work for any place that hires software developers based on which language they are most familiar with at this moment. As though a competent developer can't pick up a new language in a few weeks.

What's their criterion? I have two years of experience and I can't even get people to return my emails...

Whatever message it is it doesn't make much sense to me. We know, companies know, and even recruiters know we can pick up other languages at the drop of a hat. The reason they state the language / flavor in the role title is so that it is clear to all involved, us as php devs can make an entirely informed decision not to take the conversation further in an absolute instant, as can recruiters when they see php developer on my linked in prpfile header. I used to get a heap of java job recruitment mail before I changed it. You know why? I used to do a bit of java dev back in the day and have a lot of endorsements in it. It wasn't clear to anyone what I was interested in or what I wanted to deal with.

Secondly its not career limiting at all I can call my recruiter tomorrow and have five java/.net/node/whatever dev interviews setup over the next week all I have to say is I'm looking to move into java again and am a bit bored of php. They dont care as long as you have skills in it and can prove it. The only slightly limiting thing may be they are worried about ramp up time of productivity which is only really going to be an issue if you're in a shaky negotiating position already ie they aren't 100% on you as a developer period.

Yup, exactly. That's another nuance of what I'm hitting at in the blog entry. This is the case in a lot of big cities with big corp gigs. They're just dead end gigs. If that's all somebody wants, that's awesome. Learn .NET or Java and get that shit. But if somebody wants a bit more or a bit of freedom or a bit of changing scenery, one has to step outside of that. :)

I market myself as a Microsoft stack technical architect in the UK. I'm equally as good with clang, python, Linux, postgres and redis as well. However the pay for that stuff is shit here and the utility of it isn't great. Most paying work is gluing things that already exist together and due to inevitable economic decisions and functionality sets, Microsoft is already in those places.

General logic in employment: pick a well paying niche and milk it.

.Net is a great platform if someone else is paying for it and you (usually as a function of the business) but if you're responsible for funding it, no banana - other stacks are more cost efficient.

If there's no .net market, it is usually that the area is technically immature (startups rather than large stable businesses).

As someone who has looked for Java positions in Chicago. Those seem to be shrinking. Everywhere I look is Ruby this ruby that. Also, there seem to be a fair bit of .NET positions available.

The big 2: Groupon and Grubhub use it. But not many other startups do.

Why I love ecom so much. All the cost center freedoms but you're still treated like a product producer.

That, my friend is well said. Agreed!

We're a YC startup in California (Palo Alto) using .NET. We also use other more hip things, but .NET is the majority of our server side stack. We wanted something mature and solid that banks would use for a transaction system. Something that would let us hire great talent and not compete with all our startup buddies over RoR and node.js rockstars. Something that supported a nice mix of functional and imperative programming techniques. C#/.NET fits the bill pretty nicely.

I don't ignore the alternatives, but I certainly don't have the time to dive into every language of the month so that I can add them to my tool belt "just in case".

And, of course, even if I had them in my tool belt, I don't know too many companies that will pay what I'm making as a .NET developer to work in a language I've picked up on the side.

If there's another way, I'd love to hear about it.