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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?

#91

Post by rzimmerman »

I don't think the answer is simple. I can give you a couple of observations, having worked at tech startups and adjacent industries that are MS heavy. Mostly anecdotal and opinions/personal taste:

When companies are small and the engineers choose the tech stack and tools, they choose the ones that they like best: Slack vs Teams, G Suite vs Office, AWS or GCP vs Azure. At least in the circles I work in.

When companies are larger and/or the management and IT teams choose the tech stack, it's Microsoft's game. They are experts at selling to the business world. If you're in charge of purchasing you see that Office + Teams + Windows is much cheaper than Macbooks + Slack + GSuite. Microsoft is very good at meeting all the same requirements at a lower price, even if the experience is worse for the user.

I strongly prefer to work at a non-MS shop because the tools are better for me. But the dev stack is by no means a dead-end - there are tons of jobs and work to do in C#, .NET. Also Azure is fine, VSCode is actually very good. But you won't be an obvious fit at a small tech startup. When I see a bunch of MS stack on a resume I'm honestly skeptical of fit.

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

#92

Post by francisofascii »

For those who agree that it is a dead-end, what is a better tech stack to switch to. Assuming you are a longtime developer who spent their career on a Windows machine, enjoys developing with C#, Visual Studio, VSCode, etc? I look at React, Node, Python and think, why is that better? Maybe I have been drinking the Jon Skeet cool aid too long.

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

#93

Post by skeeter2020 »

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…

Azure has also been way more upstream towards the PaaS market, with the focus you mention on the entire MS ecosystem. We're seeing more traditionally IaaS vendors (AWS and Google) start to move in that direction so it will be interesting to see if MS can become generic faster than they can capture specific use-cases.

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

#94

Post by 908B64B197 »

ptmcc wrote: post #49
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.

That doesn't match what I've been told. It's more competitive than it has ever been out there!

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

#95

Post by skeeter2020 »

pram wrote: post #34
smhinsey wrote: post #7

I can't speak for Azure specifically, but I've been hearing variations on this theme since at least 2001 or so, when VB diehards thought the switch to .NET was going to be a failure.

The OP is clearly hyperbole, there have been failures though. Imagine if you went all in on Silverlight or Windows Phone, haha.

...this is why I'm bullish on MS/Azure but steering clear of Blazor. I love C# but don't want to couple my front end dev to it, despite the allure of "right once run everywhere" that's being pushed (once again)

I really miss my windows phone :(

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

#96

Post by tw04 »

>1) Microsoft dev stack is really a dead-end, any new startups or even large corporations starting new initiatives are more and more are moving away from any kind of MSF tech or Azure cloud development, and 2) no developer really wants to work with MSF tech.

As Amazon moves to compete directly with more and more of their customers, you'll find more and more of those customers fleeing to Microsoft and Google and IBM. At this point there is basically 0 chance MS gives up on Azure and very little chance they are not around indefinitely. They run their own services on Azure so there will always be a reason for it to exist as long as MS exists. MS is too big to be acquired, and short of government intervention of some sort are too diversified to have a bad quarter, or even a bad decade put them out of business.

You will have no issues finding a job learning the MS stack IMO, it'll likely just be more focused on the corporate world than the startup world. If you want the startup lifestyle, you'd probably have more opportunities with another stack. If you want a stable, well-paying job pretty much anywhere in the world, the MS stack is just fine.

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

#97

Post by vamega »

I'm pretty sure there are a lot of "decent" jobs out there that use C#. I saw a lot of C# used when I was working at Hedge Funds. Those overwhelmingly weren't the best paid jobs, but mostly back office/reporting jobs.

My personal take on this is that companies predominantly that work in other languages tend to pay more, and hence C# is a less desirable language to learn. This is especially true of the current crop of high paying companies (FAANG + some unicorns). None of them seem to be deep into the C# stack.

However Azure and C#/.Net aren't necessarily tied together. I've seen a lot of companies deploying other languages on top of Azure.

It's a bit of a pity with C#. C# is an excellent languages with great tooling. F# is IMO an even better language which needs a little more investment in tooling.

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

#98

Post by skeeter2020 »

formsauth wrote: post #33

This is the stupidest thing I've heard in a long time. Recruiters are boneheads who would otherwise be selling used cars.

to continue the metaphor: ...but only EVs because "The ICE is so dead only an idiot would buy one today".

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

#99

Post by R0b0t1 »

xeromal wrote: post #47
zohch wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

C# is great, but a lot of the supporting libs like Blazr are not.

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

#100

Post by Melatonic »

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…

I agree. Especially on the Azure part. AWS may be the top dog but there are tons of orgs hosting stuff on Azure. GCP may be the smaller player but has a niche as well.

Sounds like typical recruiter-speak to get you to ignore others and take one of their jobs.

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