141–147 of 147 posts
I left the Microsoft ecosystem over a decade ago and it was the right choice for me. The companies that use Microsoft are not on the leading edge of technical progress. C# is a Microsoft's Java, Azure is Microsoft's AWS, Surface is Microsoft's MacBook, Teams is Microsoft's Slack, Codeplex is Microsoft's Github - well ok I'll give them that last one they paid enough for it. But remember Github is rails. The tech isn't…
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> 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?
I was simultaneously an open source advocate (using FreeBSD 3.0) back at the point when NT4 was supposed to take over the world, and using VB and the Microsoft JVM. Back then and still today there's a lot of cruft with the MS ecosystem.
What I'm getting at is if you look at truly advanced software and what might be called "engineering" practices, there seems to be no correlation with marketing hype. Cosmos is to me the most advanced cloud NoSQL database out there feature-for-feature. I think Citus is the coolest sharded database in its particular space. C# has been pretty advanced relative to say Java for quite some time. Windows systems engineers did in fact know quite a lot, despite all the crud they had to put up with the endless parade of new MS features. The best ops person I know that built a huge unicorn that runs on Linux uses Windows as his laptop when everyone else uses Mac.
There's a bad habit in tech news of looking at the success of a company and equating it with the talent or technology choices of the engineering team. Very often, successful businesses provide enough padding for unsophisticated trendy technology to fail without consequence to the business. Likewise, many low-margin, crummy businesses are only around because they have high tech talent which can compensate.
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Can't help but to agree. Azure, SalesForce, Oracle all scream incompetence and ... easy money, lots of it.
Incompetence is everywhere, probably evenly distributed. It's just that at large scale it becomes noticeable, small orgs can float through unnoticed.
Plus, few competent people like working on it, they prefer sexy open source things, it means it's easier to stand out.
Hardly a way to have a happy career, but surely a way to have a happy (and early) retirement.
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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-pla…
I agree it's not really a bad stack or dead end for writing Linux web servers, but I wonder how many new projects are adopting it at this stage.
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I feel like there is some true observation you've made, but I can not figure out what it is from this text. I absolutely agree with your opening statement about the flashy new operations usually being crap engineers, but cannot follow any of the rest or see ho it supports that assertion. Or what little I can parse, seems backwards from my own experience. For instance, the most I hear the word "practical" is to justif…
> For instance, the most I hear the word "practical" is to justify doing something inefficient but safe, ie use a microsoft product or service and accept it's limitations and cost, or some other safe inefficient choice like vmware before azure was a thing, etc. Sure, I hear you and I've experienced this too. I've been on nightmare ASP.net spaghetti code projects that would be good fodder for programming sites. VB pro…
Ohhhh yeah. Yes.
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…