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Leaving .net

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Re: Leaving .net

#161

Post by rcoder »

jacquesm wrote: post #69
gaius wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a matter of semantics. "A Java application" is perfectly honest. Just like when someone says "a native application" it says nothing about if it was actually written in OCaml.

Until the time that HR hires a person to collaborate on your project with 'java' experience and it turns out you wrote your code in clojure. Stuff like that tends to have consequences, especially when there are contracts and liabilities involved.

I've only been on one project where HR was so far divorced from the team executing on a project to hire candidates without us vetting them, and it was (unsurprisingly) a complete disaster.

Also, if you're hiring programmers who can't pick up a new language to work on your project, you're doing it wrong. Most of the capable folks I've worked with loved learning new tech; the problem is usually keeping them from jumping onto a new platform for every project.

Re: Leaving .net

#162

Post by rcoder »

cageface wrote: post #57
lelele wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Customers will not worry about "alien" technologies, unless you sell the latter as such. This is a basic sales principle. Don't ever say you develop applications in Clojure, just say you develop in Java. Clojure is just a Jar, isn't it? Then you are just using a Java library, aren't you? Prototypes usually end up in production, don't they? Then develop such prototypes in an agile language and just make them follow th…

What makes you say Python is more appropriate for greysuits? Ruby and Python seem very much alike to me.

In a nutshell: Python actually runs well on Windows, which isn't something you can really say about MRI. (JRuby, maybe, but that brings its own set of issues.)

Linux may have gained real acceptance as a server OS, but businesses overwhelmingly still prefer Windows on the desktop.

Re: Leaving .net

#163

Post by jarek »

bphogan wrote: post #159
bl4k wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. This is what the open source world doesn't understand. You can't just copy a commercial product feature-for-feature, open source it and then scratch your head wondering why it isn't gaining adoption. When a corporate pays for software, they are paying for peace-of-mind and assurance more than the bits that make up the app.

That's true for Office and software packages like Webmail. But if you build a system using Microsoft's tools and you ask for support, they'll tell you that the problem is with your code, not their tools. They'll support issues with your web server, database server, and even your IDE, but when it comes to the code itself, there's no level of support they can truly offer. This is from 10 years of personal experience wo…

But that's what your post's parents are talking about. Microsoft won't debug your code, but they will respond if you show them a bug in their code (and you've paid for the support accounts).

Re: Leaving .net

#164

Post by bphogan »

jarek wrote: post #163
bphogan wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true for Office and software packages like Webmail. But if you build a system using Microsoft's tools and you ask for support, they'll tell you that the problem is with your code, not their tools. They'll support issues with your web server, database server, and even your IDE, but when it comes to the code itself, there's no level of support they can truly offer. This is from 10 years of personal experience wo…

But that's what your post's parents are talking about. Microsoft won't debug your code, but they will respond if you show them a bug in their code (and you've paid for the support accounts).

I was replying specifically to "When a corporate pays for software, they are paying for peace-of-mind and assurance more than the bits that make up the app."

The peace of mind part. And that support contract still hasn't provided a fix for the padded oracle exploit. It'll be "a few weeks yet."

Re: Leaving .net

#165

Post by ryanhuff »

herewego wrote: post #123
jeremymcanally wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your numbers must be pretty outdated for Rails people (or maybe you don't recruit into well-paying gigs) if you think those figures are well above what we're making. I'd say most salaries are comparable to that. And I think you're probably right for PHP and Java. The talent pool is saturated, so there's little "demand" for that sort of employee. "Oh you want $70k? Sorry, we've got 10 candidates who will take $40k. By…

Ruby in particular is hot right now and they're fetching higher salaries relative to other OS languages, you're correct about that. I clumped them all together in my query, and PHP (and Java to a lesser extent) pulled the average down. Also, notice that I didn't specify junior developers on the salary scale - they're all over the place in terms of salary. Government contract work is always the exception in any indust…

Is Ruby "hot" anywhere besides the valley? I haven't seen the significant uptick in socal, but perhaps I'm missing it.

Re: Leaving .net

#166

Post by j_baker »

jacquesm wrote: post #5
mahmud wrote: post #2

There were already open source MVC web frameworks and an army of .net developers who could have collaborated to make them great but nothing much happened. He is lamenting that the .NET community didn't embrace the pioneering MVC frameworks from the OS community, but waited for Microsoft to deliver its own "blessed" framework. Here is what he is forgetting: Economics. A good chunk of .NET developers are not using the…

Not only that, if you are a startup that wants to do b2b and you want to sell a product in to that market that will have a tight connection to stuff your clients already run you will be required to use .NET by your customers. Unless you like uphill battles that's the way you'll go eventually. It sucks, but it is the reality of the business environment, web side stuff that is abstracted through some HTTP interface you…

"Not only that, if you are a startup that wants to do b2b and you want to sell a product in to that market that will have a tight connection to stuff your clients already run you will be required to use .NET by your customers. Unless you like uphill battles that's the way you'll go eventually."

It's an uphill battle, but it's not impossible. My last job involved me writing Python for insurance companies. Yeah, there's always someone who won't accept anything that isn't written in .net or Java. But generally speaking, it's only a select few on your customers' team that will even know the difference. For the most part, businesses do actually focus on what's best for their bottom line instead of framework ideology.

Re: Leaving .net

#167

Post by diego_moita »

I will never understand this. Whenever I look at a programming technology, all I see is a tool; I just can't see all the moral drama and tragedy this guy describes. Might be a religious thing. Or I am probably very stupid, like all the other "M$ slaves",...

Re: Leaving .net

#168

Post by acabal »

aarongough wrote: post #137
acabal wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Over the years, I've personally fixed bugs. And sent in fixes. (Stop complaining -- I promise to send tests too, next time!) >>If I run into one that I am unable to grok in a reasonable time, there are always job boards and money. That's fine for a smaller shop, or even a medium-sized shop. But when you enter a true corporate behemoth type company, you don't have the option of posting an ad on the 37signals job boa…

Shouldn't the first rule of writing good software be "nothing is a black box"? At some point something in that box is not going to work how you expect it to, regardless of who makes it.

Too bad most mega-corporations aren't as concerned with writing good software as they are with staying on budget, meeting deadlines, and making money. Not to say the two are mutually exclusive, but BigCorp isn't going to want to pay for your time to learn how Apache's threading model works so that you can beat a race-condition bug in PHP's IMAP library (or whatever).

Re: Leaving .net

#169

Post by briancurtin »

lelele wrote: post #81
jiaaro wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google makes him say it ;)

Yeah, Google, for the most part. You are not using an agile language, you are using some of the technology Google relies on, aren't you? ;-) Google, and beyond it. You could easily have a case for Python: Nokia has made it available for Symbian, Microsoft endorses it via ActiveState, and so on. My friends, if we want to be effective entrepreneurs, we must learn how to repackage things in a way customers will find att…

> Microsoft endorses it via ActiveState

Microsoft has IronPython, and I'm not aware of any existing endorsement of ActivePython from AS. There used to be some partnership or agreement between the two around Python.NET, but that project has been gone for a while now.

Re: Leaving .net

#170

Post by alaithea »

The short time I spent in .NET development felt incredibly disenfranchising, when the answer to bugs found was always a denial that the bug existed or "that will be fixed in the next release."
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