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Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?

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Re: Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?

#101

Post by skeeter2020 »

Shadonototra wrote: post #30

I personally avoid microsoft tech like the plague From a carreer PoV, you'd better experimenting with everything Being vendor locked is no good, it prevents you from adopting opportunities quicker than your competitors

You don't "adopt opportunities" and being quickest is not always a benefit.

>> From a carreer PoV, you'd better experimenting with everything

This is not great advice either, especially once you're more senior. Experimentation is a great trait, if it's intentional and directed. Otherwise you're a magpie who leaves a messy trail in your wake.

If you think Azure and a lot of what MS is producing today is vendor lock-in you've never used AWS or GC. The MS developer experience is still superior to any other single company.

Re: Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?

#102

Post by marmarama »

The .net stack is pretty unexciting, but way better than it used to be and there are plenty of jobs using it. Just mostly not at startups.

Azure is huge and increasing market share. AWS is reaching some limits to its growth and some of its underlying architecture, and while it is far from perfect itself, Azure is very well placed to take advantage. It is considerably more mature than it was even 2 years ago and is a pretty decent platform to work with. It is also in no way tied to "the Microsoft stack".

I work with AWS, Azure and GCP regularly, and the node, Python, Ruby and .net ecosystems, and honestly I prefer working with .net and Azure than node and AWS. Node is a real mess of bad code, bad ideas, and inconsistent and often bad design. AWS is failing to fix serious architectural issues, and feels like none of the product teams talk to each other at all.

That said, if you've been stuck in Microsoftworld all your career, make a change.

Re: Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?

#103

Post by Melatonic »

AdamN wrote: post #21

Reminds me of a CS professor telling me that a COBOL programmer will never go hungry ... and it's still true :-) MS stack will be high quality and used by clients with $$$ for the rest of your career. With that said, any serious non-MS shop will be happy to have your experience and so switching up stacks shouldn't be a problem either if you find a good team. I would just apply broadly and go from there.

Definitely not in his lifetime at least!

I imagine in two or three hundred years though we will have moved past COBOL completely. That being said the idea of some future advanced civilization trying to wake up some old programmer from cryo sleep so they can decipher an ancient mainframe that is still somehow running does make me laugh!

Re: Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?

#105

Post by foepys »

semireg wrote: post #89
WorldMaker wrote: post #50

Scott Hanselman coined the phrase "Dark Matter Developers" nearly a decade ago (!) [1] to describe the idea that something like "99%" of developers in the world are doing stuff that is "unsexy" and "boring" and "mature" and "gets the job done" and "I can just clock out at 5pm and stop worrying about it". One of the key complaints about "Dark Matter Developers" is that you mostly don't hear from them (especially on HN…

Dark Matter Devs are a bit like people who have successfully built a life off-grid. You don’t hear from them much. Probably too busy chopping, splitting and stacking wood.

Or rather spending time with their family and friends after clocking out at 4pm without on-call or required overtime. Plus no performance reviews and goals to match for stock incentives to worry about.

Re: Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?

#106

Post by mindcrime »

Just to set the stage for my answer, let me say this: I generally dislike Microsoft and have for decades. I'm an old-skool OSS guy who has been running Linux as my main desktop OS since about 2000 (and on servers before that), tries very hard to run only OSS software in general, and still can't help but see MS as the "evil empire". So I am pre-disposed to take a negative view of MS and anything they do.

That said... I would not say that Azure is a dead-end at all. The rest of the MS dev stack, I am less sure about. But Azure as a cloud provider seems to be pretty much neck and neck with AWS, and I've seen plenty of evidence of big companies continuing to invest more and more into Azure migrations.

I haven't done any scientific comparison or anything, but from where I sit (live/work in a major tech area in the Southeast US) I get the vibe that Azure is pretty popular and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Note however, I don't intend to suggest that using Azure means anything about using any other MS tech. Most of what I see is people running Java based apps in containers on AKS backed by Linux instances.

YMMV, HTH, ETC.

Re: Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?

#107

Post by keneda7 »

Others have listed some useful stats and market share info so I will stick to my experience.

Currently working at a company that offers online pre employment testing. We integrate with a lot of applicant tracking systems. Our entire backend is written in dotnetcore. A lot of our partners are also using dotnetcore. There is no way I would classify it as a dead-end job. It definitely is not used as much at the big FAANG but there are plenty of small to medium size companies that rely on the MS dev stack.

Re: Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?

#108

Post by bob1029 »

Azure? Maybe. I have my doubts with all things cloud in 2022.

MS "development stack" (assuming .NET/C#/VS2022/AspNetCore)? Never.

You can safely disregard this recruiter's advice. Presumably, it's based on some bullshit statistical survey or other meaningless waste of time.

If you were to use HN submission statistics to determine which tech stack would be the best fit your business or career, you are probably going to fail really badly.

I've been doing pure Microsoft/.NET/C# tech stack for ~8 years now at a small startup. We solve complicated problems for other businesses. The simpler our operations are, the more $$$ we can make. You better believe that if there was some tech stack that provided a better TCO, especially in a B2B setting, we would have already been on top of it years ago. Some of the paths bandied about in popular hacker culture today didn't even exist when we started this product.

If you want popular/shiny/fun, listen to your recruiter and the broader tech community. I don't even mean this pejoratively. Some people have enough money and just want to do work that feels fun and exciting. C#/.NET is fun & exciting to me, but I can see how it's not "shiny" enough for many.

Re: Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?

#109

Post by friendlydog »

Microsoft isn't dead. Lot's of companies use it and are successful. It might not be a good fast first to market choice, or a good choice for building a quick prototype app, but sometimes you build a rope bridge before you build a wooden one. You can make money, be hired, and have a nice career using Microsoft as a back end. That being said I run from any project using blazor instead of react, angular or vue. Node, Java and dot net are great choices, if I was going to green field a new project I'd have a hard look at NextJs. As far as cloud goes you need to be familiar with at least one and willing to train on whichever the company you are hired for uses. Hiring a unicorn dev which matches a text stack is unlikely for every case, and I'd say a dev who doesn't know the stack, yet, but thinks like a dev is better than one who does but can't think like a dev.

I am pretty familiar with the North American US job market and have participated as an interviewer and interviewee.

After 40 expect discrimination in the job market, you shouldn't have to, but you will. Consider what makes your personal brand unique and play up your experience and current trajectory of upskilling.

Re: Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?

#110

Post by native_samples »

vsgzusnex wrote: post #26

While I think most people will agree it's not a dead end tech stack and their will be companies hiring for decades to come there's a element of truth here that isn't being discussed. From what I can see Microsoft stack is used mostly by enterprises that are not engineering centric. For all of the largest engineering centric companies that pay top of market only one heavily uses Microsoft....and that is Microsoft. Fur…

I think you're pretty much right.

Firstly, I guess we can ask whether Azure is genuinely the Microsoft "stack". Most Azure servers are Linux and the services they provide are mostly web, ML, RDBMS related. I don't think that's what the OP had in mind.

If by the Microsoft stack we mean Windows, SQL Server, .NET etc. Then it's definitely looking more and more dead end. In the past few months I've been working with MS tech a little bit again, getting back into a bit of Windows development. It's a mess. I am constantly left astonished by the state of internal decay that evidently exists inside the Windows divisions. Basic subsystems have serious bugs, even after being pushed for years. Their docs are a mess. Their platform is absurdly complicated - look at the schemas for an AppX manifest for an example [1]. UWP and Windows Phone are deprecated/gone yet references to it can be found everywhere. The recommended way to write Windows apps is still C++. The most exciting things they're doing with Windows are upgrading the command line support to match what Linux was doing 20 years ago. dotNET is some kind of mess with many forked versions, a language that's behind Kotlin and a runtime that's behind the JVM. And the problems just continue.

One thing that becomes clear when you look around is that very few people are really writing Windows apps at all nowadays. They exist, but they're mostly older codebases. Their attempts to move beyond Win32 have mostly tanked for this reason - the people who would once have been writing against the new APIs switched to cross platform tech.

So in this regard I feel it's a dead end stack, yeah.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/schemas/appxpackage/uap...

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