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Comment by dennybritz | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to raise a related point. While I think it's too early to worry about acquisitions, a .NET stack may put off early employees. Many engineers want to work with "hot" technologies for professional development reasons.

For example, I would not work for a company whose stack is built on top of PHP or .NET, regardless of pay. Not because these are "bad" technologies (in fact, they are a lot more stable than the hot technologies, often resulting in shorter time to market and cheaper labor), but simply because working with these technologies doesn't benefit me as much personally/professionally as working with some of the upcoming frameworks. I probably wouldn't enjoy my work too much either. To quote rubiquity from another HN thread, "people that work for other people aren't trying to build that business, they're trying to build themselves within that business."

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> a .NET stack may put off early employees.

Any choice may put off early employees. By sheer numbers, choosing .NET gives you a much larger hiring pool than, say, Haskell or NodeJS.

Yes, but it's not about the size of the hiring pool. It's about the "quality" of the hiring pool (HN likes to call them 10x engineers).

I don't have any hard numbers to back this up, but based on personal experience almost exclusively all of the best engineers I have worked with prefer to work with open source technologies and would not touch .NET. One can think of several reasons for this correlation that make intuitive sense.

There's a reverse of this going on as well. I really like the C# programming language, and I'd rather work with it than with Node.js. But if I look around what kind of companies hire .net developers, and the sort of products they build, I get the feeling I'm very lucky to have joined the Ruby community early and have a nice spot in a cool company in which engineers are king and the tech is bleeding edge.

If pressed for work I'd even work sooner in a Node.JS shop, even if I feel that Node.js is attracting the sort of developers the Ruby community tries to break away from (i.e. the PHP and Java guys)

Observer bias.

Perhaps that's true, but my sample does indeed include quite a number of startups whose stack is built on .NET. Their engineers are usually much less experienced (and are often lacking theoretical foundations. E.g. they know how to use MS tools without knowing how stuff actually works) than those of typical SV startups.

I'm sure there are good .NET engineers out there, but hiring/finding them is more like finding a needle in the haystack.

The sheer numbers are for the legions of ho-hum programmers building CRUD data-entry systems for e.g. aluminum can factories. The majority of startup-oriented engineers are a different group and I agree that .Net may be off-putting to them.

I disagree on the numbers you mention. There a amazing number of .NET engineers not writing CRUD apps. That is an over generalization. Take a look at the Unity crowd.

Also the vast majority of startups not building tech can get by with basic CRUD like apps for most of their business processes. Whatever gets you to market fastest. You will end up rewriting everything 3 times over probably in your company's life as I've learned but you won't get to do that unless you ship something.

For what it's worth, I agree that .Net could be a viable and good tool for many startups, in principle. I just think that it isn't very popular amongst Silicon Valley startup types, and one should take that into account if we're talking about hiring issues and so on.

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