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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?

#111

Post by xeromal »

R0b0t1 wrote: post #99
xeromal wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol, C# (.net) is a fantastic language with some of the world's best language designers taking part in its initial creation and updates. It has regular improvements and is LEAGES more well-design than JavaScript and I'd say Java. Sure, it's no GO, but it is ever evolving.

C# is great, but a lot of the supporting libs like Blazr are not.

One thing Microsoft does that Google does not is persistently push their garbage until it's actually not bad.

Blazr is relatively new compared to Microsoft's other libs but I'm sure in 5-10 years, it will be solid. It took .net core years before it became decent.

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

#112

Post by xupybd »

bob1029 wrote: post #108

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 t…

I'm making the choice for a new tech stack and .NET is winning. For getting the job done reliably it's looking like the strongest contender.

I'm not sure why there isn't more momentum towards using .NET.

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

#114

Post by guilhas »

A recruiter meeting companies and developers will probably have some knowledge

I am from a startup using Microsoft

But I am the opinion that companies doing boring development tend to use a lot Microsoft. Less cutting edge. More standard

Also because their tools are so integrated, the developer mindset kind of gets stuck. And less open to new and experimental. So they might get themselves too comfortable and stale

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

#115

Post by CottonMcKnight »

Quite the opposite. Microsoft has all the momentum: GitHub and NPM were very strategic acquisitions; Visual Studio Code is completely dominant; TypeScript is already a de-facto standard for large projects.

Those acquisitions in particular are already paying big dividends: very little new tech has excited me the way that GitHub Copilot does.

Conversely, AWS is the standard, and is way ahead, but it doesn't inspire enthusiasm the way that Microsoft tech does. They are laser-focused entirely on expanding their services to every conceivable niche, but (IMO) they are ignoring the fundamentals of developer experience, at their own peril.

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

#116

Post by abernard1 »

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…

> From what I can see Microsoft stack is used mostly by enterprises that are not engineering centric.

I'm going to counter this anecdote with my anecdote. I have spent roughly half of my time in the boring world and half in the HN "sexy" tech world. 25 years of programming experience and have had immense failures and some pretty good successes.

Unquestionably, the sexy tech people were—and to this day are—worse technologists than the boring enterprise software people. I have worked at two unicorns.

One of things I believe to be true (and which is probably offensive but here goes) is that the sexy work is a direct result of over-financialization of the sector. It's a form of signaling: "Hey, our business model is so successful we can afford this shitty niche technology and hiring too many people."

There is a direct correlation between people using trendy yet mediocre technology and comments like "let's be practical" and explaining why your software can be worse than it is, because those companies don't actually need technology. As well, the people that manage those organizations are not particularly impressive because they need large groups of people to scale. (It's also why people like a16z can have the gall to claim 10x devs is not a thing, because if it were, the SV model of get-big-quick and hiring huge amount of devs with big capital and unsustainable unit economics would not be a successful proposition.)

Since the late 90s, the governing model has been: "Hey, that's cool what you do. But have you thought about putting it on The Internet?". It's the Portlandia bird sketch but with Put a Web On It. Apply this to Big Data or ML etc. This model has been very good for growth, but it requires absolutely minimal technical expertise.

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

#117

Post by belltaco »

onion2k wrote: post #5

Azure has about 21% market share and revenue of around $15.1bn (sort of, MSFT bundle it with 'Intelligent Services' in their reporting). Someone must be using it. It clearly isn't dead. Secondly, some recruiters are liars who will tell you literally anything to try to get you to apply for jobs they're recruiting for. A recruiter saying MSFT stack is a dead-end just means they don't have many MSFT stack jobs on their…

Any large business that's remotely in competition with Amazon corp is (rightfully) scared by Amazon's use of marketplace sellers' data to compete with them, and don't host on AWS, because they're afraid of Amazon using AWS data(that they have complete access to) to compete with them. So this goes for almost all retailers, grocery stores etc.

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

#118

Post by polotics »

dustymcp wrote: post #75
onion2k wrote: post #5

Azure has about 21% market share and revenue of around $15.1bn (sort of, MSFT bundle it with 'Intelligent Services' in their reporting). Someone must be using it. It clearly isn't dead. Secondly, some recruiters are liars who will tell you literally anything to try to get you to apply for jobs they're recruiting for. A recruiter saying MSFT stack is a dead-end just means they don't have many MSFT stack jobs on their…

We use the full Stack just like alot of the firms around us, i have a feeling the foss Linux crowd is trying to say otherwise its not popular blabla fact is alot of Dev happens there its not a deadend..

I think the ratio of open-source contributing company ia going to be much lower around the MSFT ecosystem than on others. This does not mean less work or less skills are around, they are just less visible. Case in point: node and the whole JavaScript ecosystem seems to have a bad case of the look-at-me's...

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

#119

Post by kcartlidge »

native_samples wrote: post #110
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 t…

I'd agree with most of your points - the nature of the MS stack, Windows dev being a mess, docs polluted by related-but-deprecated technologies/versions etc.

Where I'd disagree strongly is dotNET being a mess of forked versions, the language being behind Kotlin, and the runtime behind the JVM.

The DotNet versioning annoys me, but it is actually straightforward. The Windows-only framework stopped at v4, then cross-platform Core began at v1 and now we've reached the point where Core v6 is just DotNet v6 because there is no non-core alternative at this versioning point. If you set aside naming/numbering confusion, you have a forward-moving framework up to v4 being overtaken by a rewritten cross-platform framework catching up then replacing it. There were some mishaps on the way, but this is not a mess of forked versions it is actually a pretty fast deprecation and replacement of a huge system with a massive high quality effort.

As for the main DotNet language, C#, it is generally not considered to be behind any other language out there. Perhaps in some areas different approaches have been taken when it comes to syntax, structure, tooling, but it is a very well designed language that is professionally respected, advanced, and innovative.

As for the runtime, it really isn't behind the JVM. It is supported on fewer platforms, but those it is supported on are very well catered for. Including not needing a (shared) runtime at all as builds can produce single binaries too, as per Java.

So no, the problems don't continue.

I do wonder if your recent experience of it may well be true, but is influenced by it being Windows development. Outside of internal enterprise tools, the main work is on the web/network (not Windows) and that's where it excels.

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

#120

Post by samspenc »

belltaco wrote: post #117
onion2k wrote: post #5

Azure has about 21% market share and revenue of around $15.1bn (sort of, MSFT bundle it with 'Intelligent Services' in their reporting). Someone must be using it. It clearly isn't dead. Secondly, some recruiters are liars who will tell you literally anything to try to get you to apply for jobs they're recruiting for. A recruiter saying MSFT stack is a dead-end just means they don't have many MSFT stack jobs on their…

Any large business that's remotely in competition with Amazon corp is (rightfully) scared by Amazon's use of marketplace sellers' data to compete with them, and don't host on AWS, because they're afraid of Amazon using AWS data(that they have complete access to) to compete with them. So this goes for almost all retailers, grocery stores etc.

Yup, this is why major retailers (Walmart etc) don't use Amazon cloud services and instead use a competitor. I believe Walmart and some other large retailers use Azure but the retail industry in general is split between Azure & GCP for their cloud computing needs because they don't want to feed their competitor.
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