Software Engineers Will Work One Day For English Majors

Agreed that people outside of .NET embrace open source more easily, but disagree that they don't embrace leading edge technologies. As an example, when LINQ was released, it was widely taken up.

Where I'm disagreeing with you was in your statement "the .NET ecosystem and culture is notoriously corporate, and not very innovative or leading edge". It may well be a framework loved by corporations ("notorious" is an emotive term with no substance), but you haven't proven to me that they don't innovate or that the ecosystem or culture is not leading edge. I appreciate you've committed to .NET projects, which is awesome, but argument through authority isn't really anything to disprove what I've said!

Sorry if you feel that I've ignored your points, but I raised LINQ as just one example, you dismissed Microsoft's embracement of dynamic languages in the framework and WPF and WCF aren't innovative apparently. Like I say, we can agree to disagree!

Edit: I've reread the thread, and I can see the bone of contention. My fault here: I talked merely about the leading edge technologies, whereas I was objecting more to the assertion that there was little or a minority of innovation. Of course, I didn't actually state that so the discussion went on a bit of a tangent. Sorry about that!

Though you may not think you know much about SEO or conversion, explaining the benefits that you pick up from casual reading on HN tends to bring the business cards out pretty quick.

When I did my CS degree we were taught Java and that was all most people knew. A few also knew PHP because they were interested in webdev or Visual Basic/Pascal because that was what they had done at A Level. I don't think anyone on the course knew functional programming until we did a module in it.

This was particularly pronounced when we were given an assignment to do where the tools to be used were not specified but it was to basically build a shopping cart system. Obviously the best tool to use would be either something like PHP or to use Java but with JSP etc.

What the majority of the students produced was a AWT/Swing application to control the shopping cart and used the file writing classes (FileOutputWriter etc) to output HTML.

Perhaps the difference though is that young developers would expect to be re-taught a bunch of different stuff when they started their first job.

Instead talk about increased ROI, more conversions, decreased support costs, better PR, etc. Talk to potential customers about their problems first. Then give them solutions to their problems.

Ideally have stories from previous customers about those areas. Stories sell much better than skill lists.

For example a while back I sent this letter (lightly edited to removed some identifying material).

Hi $joe,

Thanks for talking to me last week about $company. From our chat it looks like your biggest problem was transitioning from startup geeks to long term customers. I think we can help.

We worked with $similar-company who had the same sort of issue reaching their long-term market. After helping them re-build their on- and off-line marketing materials their sales team saw a big increase in qualified leads, which helped them save money and focus their sales folk on some new markets. Conversions also increased significantly.

If you like I can put you in contact with their CTO and head of sales who can talk about their experiences with us.

If you'd like to talk about this further we should meet up. I could come and meet you next Friday afternoon in your offices. Drop me a line if this sounds interesting or if you have any further questions.

Cheers,

Adrian

Note how I'm not talking about user interviews, analysing their search engine results, a new visual design, user testing, new CMS, web design, HTML5, jQuery, agile development, etc. Despite the fact that we did it all for $similar-company.

Instead I'm saying "You told me this was you're biggest problem. Look we solved it for $other-company. Here are some people you can talk to for verification. Here is what you should do next".

Find out their biggest business problems. Show them you can help them solve it. Leave out the details of how until the last possible moment.

Interesting. I wasn't aware of an age breakdown of HN readers. Could you point me to it?

Most of the people I personally know on HN are over 30... but that may be selection bias on my part :-)

Given that there isn't a puzzle/test type of way to rank managers, the management positions get doled out as opposed to competed for

That may be true of some organisations, but certainly not all. Managers get judged on a bunch of metrics in many organisations... often bad ones unfortunately (then again - so are puzzle questions for developers :-)