61–70 of 147 posts
Azure is an inferior platform to the alternatives on a technical level, but they make up for it with stronger enterprise relationship-building than AWS/GCP, and they do generally try to keep up with broad AWS capabilities of not the actual quality.
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…
J. Fogerty, if you're reading this, I miss overhearing your engineering conversations with your colleagues.
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…
And moreover that 21% is trending upwards according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/967365/worldwide-cloud-i...
And of course, Microsoft-based stacks (MSSQL, ASP.NET, .NET including Core) is still a very solid stack that gets shit done. It may not be "sexy" but if you look beyond the "developer" angle and look at the "solving business problems" angle, you can "get shit done" with an MS stack and your clients won't care because they only want the "shit done", regardless of how it is done.
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…
Would I love to branch out into different stacks and have lots of side projects that I could show off on HN? Sure. But a "stable and boring" 9-5 job gives me the work/life balance that I need.
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)
A lot of customers would hear "We are on AWS" and immediately follow up with "Are you planning on Azure? We have standardized on Azure." So many customers asked about running one of the PaaS products on Azure that the company was basically forced to build an Azure version. These were all well known Fortune companies in the Fortune 100/500, not some failing big-corp.
That being said, the customers were all large non software companies (e.g. Volkswagen). We definitely didn't sell to startups outside of some marketing BS.
I don't think Azure is a dead-end. But from a pure job flexibility standpoint, AWS obviously gives you the largest set of employers to choose from if you want to work for a startup or software company.
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…
When I worked on Wall St., I did soooo many accounting reports I wanted to pull my hair out :-P I'm guessing most programmers are in that boat, doing maintenance programming for accounting apps, billing apps, etc.
But like you said, it was decent pay and zero stress...