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

I really think it has very little to do with .NET -- I can take .NET or leave it, depending on the nature of my needs.

I think it has much more to do with the smart-ass feeling you get reading it, combined with the fact that, if you're any good at all in the .NET universe, you know better.

That made me think of all the times I've spoken to developers when they just knew that such-and-such was true. And it wasn't. That same snarky attitude, that same over-generalizing, that same use of silliness to try to mask the predjudice.

I wouldn't throw out working with this clown. Who knows? Might be fun. But the attitude is worthy of comment, and, since I have been known to be this way myself, I feel like I can honestly jump in.

But really, who this guy wants or doesn't want, or what his opinions are don't matter that much. The interesting question would be how he deals with realizing he doesn't know so much. That's true for anybody.

their office was just 1 room, with 3 guys sitting at a single table. they kept offering me a beer. i guess it was to seem hip, seeing there's no real reason to have a beer during a job interview.

another funny thing from applying is in the coding test they show you how to connect to their api using javascript, but it would never work because of cross domain restrictions. they probably have only tried it over localhost ;p

i wound up not getting the job because i used the kohana mvc framework in the coding test and they 'couldnt understand my code.' i think in all i wrote less than 150 lines of clear, commented code, but they dismissed it outright because i used these things called classes. im sort of glad i didnt get the job, because i got a job paying literally double their offering salary the next day.

I think the real moral of this story is: (1) avoid technology religion and it's practitioners, (2) if you're cooking steaks on a gas grill and you see your CTO warming up a dead squirrel over a book of matches, find another job.

this stuff honestly makes me sad for this industry. There are probably 100's of programmers that will now never get to work in the start up world because they list c#/.net etc on there resumes.

I guess he is talking about the various Microsoft supplied frameworks. Within say, Silverlight, it is easy to dip your toe in, get to something like databinding, and go off the rails, trying to bend silverlight to your will to do something that should be easy, and coming away with the impression that what you are doing is totally impossible within silverlight. Then you spend 20 minutes actually thinking instead of in a Microsoft hate fugue state and you see that it actually is easy if you don't fight the framework. So you are like "fuck you .net I want to do it my way!"

But that is the nature of frameworks, not endemic to .net.