Quite the opposite. Tons of opportunities with both. Many corporations are locked in to C# more or less permanently.
Using C# really shouldn't have any bearing on your choice of cloud.
Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?
11–20 of 147 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?
#12It depends who you want to work for. C# and Windows tend to be more popular with a certain type of company, often one more established.
The node/react world tends to be more popular with younger companies and startups.
You'll find overlap in these worlds but it is a hard road to go against the overall direction of a market. It'll limit opportunities but can be done. It's up to you to figure out which is more suitable. But it's not a dead-end. If you're looking around and noticing your peers aren't into the same things you are, you may be trying to go against the direction of the market. You could try changing your peers.
Re: Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?
#13Not true, however, I'd wager that the opportunities won't be trendy and hip. You are more likely to be working on some dashboard for a 70 year old corporation as opposed to building parts of the stack for the next new hotness.
Re: Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?
#14Re: Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?
#15Would strongly disagree. I'd also suggest that in my experience MSFT shops tend to be more "conservative" on the whole vs a lot of other stacks.
By conservative I mean not rushing into new shiny things all the time, finding out later down the line that it isn't fit for purpose and having to rewrite it. If anything they are the other way round (too much .NET framework dev still going on IMO). The JS ecosystem is terrible for this and I find it really frustrating.
I would agree though that it is seen as quite an uncool stack and I don't see many startups use it, which is a shame as .NET core really changed the equation for me on the whole stack (I really disliked having to use windows server before).
However, there are still an enormous amount of corporates and SMEs that use it, so I can't see the work drying up. Often the pay is better as well at these firms than startups (but probably less chance of a big equity payoff).
Re: Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?
#16You’ll be fine; the way I look at it, AWS is built for product development and Azure is built for corporate IT. Many companies have simply accepted Microsoft lock-in. I have a number of clients moving from AWS into Azure to take advantage of free money and discounts from Microsoft for having an ESA for O365.
In short, Microsoft has the best B2B software sales engine that has ever existed. This has been true for at least 30 years. It’s the main reason for their success — they know how to get people to pay for their products. It’s not the flashiest tech but it’s enough of what their users need, and the sales engine makes doing business with Microsoft easy. AWS has a lot more friction in their enterprise sales process, so they rely a lot more on developer inertia and word of mouth.
Re: Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?
#17startups maybe - but large corporations might be a different question. At my last company, 40,000 people, they used MS Office and I had the impression the sales pitch and glide path from Microsoft to just embrace the Azure cloud was a strong one, so many teams use Azure ...
Re: Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?
#18That is complete BS. The MSFT dev stack is alive and well, it is not going anywhere. Azure is widely used in enterprises and startups.
Re: Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?
#19Do you plan on retiring before or after 2050? I have been hearing MS tools and languages are dead and buried for two decades. They'll be here long after I retire.
And probably after we expire :)
Re: Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?
#20I don't think Microsoft stack offers a path to like, a mid-six-figure job at a major Silicon Valley tech company. Nor will you me able to leverage much of the SV ecosystem if you're trying to do a startup. In that sense it could be seen as a career dead end.
But there are plenty of solidly middle-class developer jobs in the IT departments of traditional companies, and a robust ecosystem of small consulting firms all around the country; I would guess that your best bet for optimizing lifetime earnings on the Microsoft stack is to grow some business savvy and start one of those.