[octobus2021]

A few thoughts:

- Recruiters are basically sales people. Some (not all) will try to convince you that the stack they're specializing in is the best one in the world and the rest of technologies are almost dead (nothing personal against recruiters btw, they are people and need to put the food on the table too).

- Microsoft has a higher barrier to entry, and makes it more difficult to leave. So you won't see many 3-people startups but more established companies who've been with MSFT since Windows 95/2000.

- Cannot speak for the front-end (I'm assuming .NET/etc), I've been specializing in MSFT BI for a number of years (since pre-Azure). Definitely see that the space somewhat stagnated, new companies are not starting their BI/data analytics projects with MSFT toolset, new entrants mostly go with AWS (Amazon throws a lot of money to continuously improve it and beef up their consulting arm) and other vendors. AWS seems to better suit rapid development philosophy as in "let's get all the data we can get in one place and see what we can do with it". MSFT tools are better suited for traditional data warehousing (as in "Enterprise Data Warehouse") concept which is currently (deservedly) frowned upon. Yes I know MSFT has the Data Lake, Spark, Kafka, etc etc but they are essentially playing catch-up with AWS and all the smaller guys, while incurring higher cost for their customers.

[Edit: formatting]