I love C# (but most of my use of it is via Unity these days). I feel the opposite way about Azure (it feels much clunkier than the alternatives to me), and so won't work where I would have to use it... But as other commenters have pointed out there seem to be plenty of people who have no issues with it (or use it despite how they feel).
Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?
131–140 of 147 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even Microsoft itself doesn't pay top of market anymore. They are increasingly known as one of the lower paying "big tech" companies.
That doesn't match what I've been told. It's more competitive than it has ever been out there!
From my experience, out of the big 5 they pay the lowest.
Re: Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?
#133It’s just changing. The knowledge is still useful but I think I wouldn’t invest heavily today. They are working hard on working well with Linux. Look at WSL and .net core. Azure, now hosts more Linux VMs than Windows. Their cloud will be a competitor for sure however I think long term GCP may overtake them.
Would I go hard learning C#, kernel32, IIS and MSVC today? No. I would bet against a windows desktop environment in 15 years time, however that’s just me. We also see a shift from Active Directory as well for managing your users.
It’s still in demand and useful however. One thing I will say from personal experience, overseas clients use Microsoft more than the US ones. In Israel, I swear every company was using Microsoft’s stack.
I would just go in with a I can learn anything attitude in interviews and not get stuck on being boxed into A Microsoft environment.
Re: Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Azure is not bad compared to the options. Also, MSFT is throwing a lot of brain power at it (notable systems researchers from MSR). Curious what you consider is better?
most of my bad experience with Azure is the control interface, which is worse than AWS/GCP in every way random incomprehensible error messages, near constant UI timeouts and terrible UI performance and experience (artifact deployment has been "skipped"? why? no way to know), etc the Windows VMs are also extremely slow compared to my employer's non-azure VM, with the Azure VMs having double the VCPUs, disk IOPS and RA…
I haven't experienced these UI problems despite regular use of Azure.
The VM speed I can't comment on.
Re: Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?
#135Earlier 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.
Sigh. Often MS software is not understood by those that criticize it.
Re: Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?
#136Scott 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…
I search job site such indeed.com for demands of job categories. (Data driven) Here are the returns for jobs within 25 miles of where I live (bay area.) Keywords jobs ---------------------------- Azure 3094 AWS 7408 Google Cloud 2157 React 3829 (not cloud tech, but just curious to know.)
I'm not really surprised.
Azure isn't that different from AWS (once you used one cloud, you can pretty much port the fundamentals to another cloud). Sure some components have different names and you might have to use a different language, but it should not be a challenge for any engineer.
The Microsoft Stack is also... not that exotic. C# and Java are both pretty similar, and Microsoft is where TypeScript appeared. And they adopted Git as well in the last decade.
I remember a few years ago a lot of devs preferring C# but who didn't want to commit to Windows Server. With .NET now being cross platform and having good Linux support, I wouldn't be surprised to see more tech company using it.
Re: Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?
#137While 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 tech…
> 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."
How much of that was a result of companies wanting to use Linux server-side and MS not supporting it?
Re: Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Just like silverlight amiright
Re: Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Just like silverlight amiright
We don't talk about silverlight. Haha.
Re: Ask HN: Are Microsoft development stack and Azure a dead-end career path?
#140Scott 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…
TIL I am a Dark Matter Developer. AMA (Yes we use the Azure stack!)