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Comment by ctidd | Hacker News Reader

Your complaint is that you hear about too many opportunities in the "career-limiting" area of .NET development? No .NET developers are looking for work? Sounds like anyone wanting to be employed should get familiar with .NET.

Or do you just disagree with the job title having a language in it?

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"Career-limiting" != No Career.

Here in Chicago, .NET jobs pay less than other technologies. A RoR developer with 4 years of experience probably earns as much as a .NET dev with 8. If that .NET dev is lucky.

Most of the .NET job listings I get recruiter spammed with are for enterprise development things from companies whos primary "product" isn't technology. So if you work for them, you're working in a cost center and will be treated as such.

Edit: By the way, there's always been a shortage of .NET developers for as long as I can remember- even going back to '04 and '05 when the industry was starting to recover. But the salaries always trailed even then. You could make 5-10K more doing Java work in those days. No clue why.

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. :)

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.

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).

I'm not the author, just the submitter. But he pretty much nailed the situation in Portland right now. If you're a .Net developer and you're any good there is tons of work, for great pay. But there is a huge OSS startup scene running parallel in this city that probably better represents where the future of the industry will go eventually. If you bet all your chips on the .Net horse you may not like it later down the road.

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

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.

Well it isn't just the language that would be of interest, it's the APIs and the existing libraries that are domainspecific that takes time learning. I find it very reasonable for recruiters to look for people knowledgeable in the programming language(s) that their clients utilize in their production since those developers will most often be quicker in their job.

All else being equal, sure.

Sure, you can pick up C# in a few weeks, but there's no way to become a competent .Net developer in 3 weeks. It's not that it's difficult to learn, but there is so much to learn. In 3 weeks you may be able to drag and drop and autogenerate enough stuff but serious development would take much longer for someone with no experience.

The same could be said about Ruby, Python, Node, etc.

[Author o' the blog entry] I just threw a bunch of the snarky response to a bunch of the arbitrary job definitions together, with some oddball nuance and wrote up the blog entry.

It's all a lot of tongue in cheek, some serious, mostly just me being ridiculous. There's no shortage of gigs right now any which way one looks at it. Somebody could get a job writing COBOL or RPG or Pascal if they really wanted to.

I believe the latter point is the one he's making, but from reading his letter I gathered the former. His cheeky remark on Node.js, etc. made it seem more plausible for me (until I read his last paragraph).

As a 'PHP Dev' who plays with a number of things outside of my job, I agree with the overall sentiment, but I'm not sure that he's getting the message he wants across.

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.

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