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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?

#71

Post by tus666 »

WorldMaker wrote: post #50

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…

Defense industry and "adjacent" industries software engineering is a HUGE portion of the employment market. And no, they are not typically saying what they are doing on HN.

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

#72

Post by oneplane »

It's not, but it might simply be a matter of taste and preference. I personally do see a major difference in culture with companies that use Azure vs. AWS vs. GCP. I personally don't want to work for an Azure-dependant company again, and preferably not GCP either, but it'll do in a pinch.

Work on having portable knowledge if you want that security, and work on what you like to have an enjoyable job.

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

#73

Post by fareesh »

the_only_law wrote: post #36
fareesh wrote: post #13

Not true, however, I'd wager that the opportunities won't be trendy and hip. You are more likely to be working on some dashboard for a 70 year old corporation as opposed to building parts of the stack for the next new hotness.

> You are more likely to be working on some dashboard for a 70 year old corporation as opposed to building parts of the stack for the next new hotness. Eh, both of those sound equally terrible.

Well the way I imagined them to be is two extremes

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

#75

Post by dustymcp »

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..

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

#76

Post by ocdtrekkie »

WorldMaker wrote: post #50

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…

This is definitely true. If you're lucky enough to be skilled in such a popular stack that does truly become a dead end, you are still winning, because now you're like a COBOL developer today: A rare and precious commodity.

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

#77

Post by blibble »

throwawaybbqed wrote: post #54
blibble wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 RAM (despite having the same "stack" deployed on it)

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

#78

Post by dustymcp »

nostromo wrote: post #55
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…

But the question is if you want to work at the 21% of companies that use Microsoft. Based on my own experience, you probably don't. They tend to be legacy companies in low-growth areas and lower pay.

This is simply not true.

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

#79

Post by MattGaiser »

There probably needs to be some differentiation between Microsoft Stack and Azure. Azure is just a cloud.

My last company used Azure for everything. The languages of development were overwhelmingly JavaScript, Python (Django and Flask), with a tiny bit of Java. c# did arrive, but only after the development team mostly all quit and they had to rehire.

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

#80

Post by Jensson »

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.

Do any programmers go hungry?
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