[onion2k]

Azure has about 21% market share and revenue of around $15.1bn (sort of, MSFT bundle it with 'Intelligent Services' in their reporting). Someone must be using it. It clearly isn't dead.

Secondly, some recruiters are liars who will tell you literally anything to try to get you to apply for jobs they're recruiting for. A recruiter saying MSFT stack is a dead-end just means they don't have many MSFT stack jobs on their books. If they had one they'd put you forward for it, and not tell you that they think the stack is a dead-end.

MSFT's stack is not going to disappear any time soon. It's growing just like all the rest of the industry. There's definitely no harm in learning other things, but don't write it off if you want to carry on with it either.

[CommanderData]

Alot of recruiters namely in London are outright liers.

So much so they will have you go through the job process to meet their targets or even when they know better candidates are being put forward.

They employ so many unethical tactics it's best to always check with the company directly if the role still exists.

We work with many recruitment agencies and having seen and heard what I have I no longer would take any at face value if I was on the other end.

[kevinventullo]

And moreover that 21% is trending upwards according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/967365/worldwide-cloud-i...

[NotVerstappen]

A lot of early cloud adopters were more "nimble" organisations who didn't have deep ties to MS enterprise agreements. We are now in the phase where those large enterprises have gotten over their early cloud experimentation phase and are migrating for real - which will result in a bit of an MS resurgence I expect.

[belltaco]

Any large business that's remotely in competition with Amazon corp is (rightfully) scared by Amazon's use of marketplace sellers' data to compete with them, and don't host on AWS, because they're afraid of Amazon using AWS data(that they have complete access to) to compete with them. So this goes for almost all retailers, grocery stores etc.

[samspenc]

Yup, this is why major retailers (Walmart etc) don't use Amazon cloud services and instead use a competitor. I believe Walmart and some other large retailers use Azure but the retail industry in general is split between Azure & GCP for their cloud computing needs because they don't want to feed their competitor.

[nostromo]

But the question is if you want to work at the 21% of companies that use Microsoft.

Based on my own experience, you probably don't. They tend to be legacy companies in low-growth areas and lower pay.

[CactusOnFire]

While Azure companies do tend to skew "larger enterprise", I don't think it's fair to say they are lower paying. If anything, more Azure-related jobs I have seen a higher-price point on than AWS jobs (in my local sphere). I think this is because Azure has higher demand than supply, and people are less likely to choose it as their primary cloud right out the gate.

It's also worth noting that a lot of consulting companies focus on Azure. This is because of perverse incentives, but still worth noting.

[dustymcp]

This is simply not true.

[Melatonic]

I agree. Especially on the Azure part. AWS may be the top dog but there are tons of orgs hosting stuff on Azure. GCP may be the smaller player but has a niche as well.

Sounds like typical recruiter-speak to get you to ignore others and take one of their jobs.

[dustymcp]

We use the full Stack just like alot of the firms around us, i have a feeling the foss Linux crowd is trying to say otherwise its not popular blabla fact is alot of Dev happens there its not a deadend..

[polotics]

I think the ratio of open-source contributing company ia going to be much lower around the MSFT ecosystem than on others. This does not mean less work or less skills are around, they are just less visible. Case in point: node and the whole JavaScript ecosystem seems to have a bad case of the look-at-me's...

[ur-whale]

> some recruiters are liars who will tell you literally anything

This has been my experience as well, and on both side of the fence (as a potential hire and as a recruiting manager).

In both case, this does great harm.