CEO Friday: Why we don’t hire .NET programmers

I'll bite...

.Net as a framework is designed to get stuff done so you can go home and play with your kids, not pander to the whims of a CEO with his head up his behind.

According to him, I shall have to "unlearn" all those ever so bad practices and technologies such as ORM/DDD (NHibernate), DI (Autofac), SoC (MVC), SOLID, Messaging (NServiceBus), SOA (WCF)...

I will give him one thing; at least 75%+ of the "developers" on the market in the UK couldn't put a web page together without the ASP.Net webforms designer but the same is true with all technologies otherwise we wouldn't have dreamweaver and the likes.

The guy is a total muppet.

Is this guy qualified to talk about hiring programmers? Based on all the little errors in detail in his blog, I assume he's the non-technical co-founder of his company, not the technical guy.

I think every developer who reads the article should link to it. That way when any future employee googles them they will see what an ass they would be working for.

Actually, you shouldn't. I was getting fumed by the end of his first paragraph where he bragged about his decent programmers being able to fence and do knife play. If he's looking for mercenaries* who can code I should email him! Anyway, I read on and he made several contradictions to his own points. I can't take him seriously now.

*not a mercenary but I'm a runner who flies planes and is a good shot with a Glock, but I sure as hell wouldn't put that on my resume

This article deserves to be slammed, and it's been well slammed, but there's a nugget of wisdom inside it:

Once you've exhausted your friend-of-a-friend type referral hiring, you need some way of turning thousands of resumes into tens of resumes for interviewing.

And no matter what filter you use, there are lots of examples of good candidates who fail it. The canonical example is GPA. The ratio of good programmers to poor programmers is higher in those with high GPA's (IMO), but there are tons of good programmers who flunked out of college.

There are lots of crappy .NET programmers out there, so filtering out .NET programmers will discard a lot of chaff. There'll still be wheat in the chaff, but you've got to get a shortlist somehow.

An even better filter might be to filter out anybody who calls .NET a language. Would that mean they have to fire the CEO too?