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

While the McDonalds kitchen analogy is kinda applicable, the theory of malicious lock-in is just plain silly.

Did it ever occur to you that just maybe Microsoft's customers are big corporations that routinely employ the programmer equivalent of french fry managers? And maybe, just maybe, Microsoft's products are highly successful at achieving the benevolent goal of engineering a product for their target audience?

As a former hard-core .NET developer and Microsoft employee -- who hasn't run a Windows box at home since nearly two years before quitting Microsoft -- I agree that most .NET developers are kinda lost in a Microsoft-crafted echo-chamber la-la land. But I don't agree that it's got anything to do with nefarious intentions, rather it's got to do with social dynamics and product/market fit.

this is so arrogant..

Great assertions. How about some evidence or examples?

.NET was created to be as different as possible from everything else out there? Show me at least one example. Further, show that it was deliberately done in order to be different.

Backslashes in path names? What does this have to do with .NET?

Left-handed coordinate system in DirectX? What does this have to do with .NET?

A dozen complex files before you even write a line of code? When I start a new .NET project (desktop), I get an XML and a basically-XML file that are so straight-forward that I regularly modify them in a plain text editor, and I've never even read the documentation on them.

Allergic to open-source licensing? I use at least a half dozen open source .NET projects on a daily basis.

Every day with .NET takes two days to unlearn? The author is just throwing out random numbers and ideas at this point.

The author comes across as having nothing but preconceived notions of .NET. I'm with the others. I wouldn't want to work for you... or even with you.

Stop

Feeding

The

Troll

Although I also dislike .NET, it seems the primary complaint here about .NET is that it abstracts programmers too much away from the bare metal. But doesn't that apply equally to non-MS languages like Python and Ruby? In fact, isn't abstraction in general a good thing?

The author also bewails .NET's lack of configurability. But what is it about C# that instantly defiles any programmer who touches it, that doesn't also apply to, say, Java?