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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?

#41

Post by zwieback »

gigel82 wrote: post #29

If anything, it's quite the opposite (at least in cloud): https://www.srgresearch.com/articles/cloud-market-ends-2020-... C# for non-backend scenarios is a different story; no charts but IMO it's been going downhill since WinForms (WPF, UWP, Blazer, etc. all dead in the water).

Yes, that's a sad situation. C# is a great general purpose language but for us desktop developers following MS GUI trends is a nightmare. WinUI 3 is the latest attempt to unify stuff.

In general MS still seems like a safe bet given how tightly it's integrated across many large corporations.

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

#42

Post by blibble »

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.

> MS stack will be high quality

I've yet to experience a MS product that I would consider to be "high quality" (including Azure)

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

#43

Post by [deleted] »

activitypea wrote: post #32

Azure's main selling point is its integration with the rest of Microsoft's products. If you're a large non-tech company/enterprise with an IT department (all of them) that's locked into MS business/enterprise products (most of them), any sort of software development is gonna be on Azure. No other cloud can compete. I think Azure experts are already highly valuable, and will only become more valuable as more non-tech…

[deleted]

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

#45

Post by zwieback »

rwaksmunski wrote: post #31
anovikov wrote: post #10

Totally wrong. Many incompetent people are using it. And incompetent people is where the money to be made is.

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.

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

#46

Post by acdha »

Never rely on a recruiter to give you a complete and unbiased story. Even if they’re being honest – about half the time in my experience – their perspective is limited to their personal blend of clients. If someone is recruiting for startups they’ll have a different perspective than large tech companies or large non-tech companies, government, etc. — and their direct interest ends when they get paid after you accept the job, so long-term happiness is only a factor for the good ones.

I would certainly make sure you have experience with multiple options in different categories so you have a good baseline for comparisons (e.g. AWS is the most popular so you’re not going to regret learning it but Azure isn’t exactly nothing). Beyond that, look at what’s popular in your area — e.g. if it’s mostly Java, you might want to learn that, move to a bigger market, or survey the remote options. I would be surprised if you didn’t have C# openings in any major metro area but all employers aren’t created equal and it might be a good red flag to heed if there isn’t much and/or they don’t have a good reputation.

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

#47

Post by xeromal »

zohch wrote: post #40
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.

> MS stack will be high quality As someone who has used the MS stack, I have yet to witness anything I would call high quality.

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.

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

#49

Post by ptmcc »

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…

Even Microsoft itself doesn't pay top of market anymore. They are increasingly known as one of the lower paying "big tech" companies.

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

#50

Post by WorldMaker »

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): they don't have splashy startups to advertise, they aren't exciting recruiters with the things they claim to be doing. They are getting jobs done and clocking out.

That continues to describe a LOT of the jobs using the Microsoft stack, they are Dark Matter Jobs: they are in almost every industry in the world. They pay well enough, but not too well. They aren't exciting. HN and sometimes Big Shot Recruiters generally have no reason to hear from them (because they hire more directly, or because they only need a couple developers at a time).

The Microsoft Stack jobs will probably always be like that. Just quietly out there (and all around). Numbers and statistics (and revenue) all suggest that there are a lot of them. They just sound like a "dead end" mostly because they are "stable" and "boring".

[1] https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un...

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