| > which is kind of annoying since he's the most active C#/.Net recruiter in my area Tangent: I like .NET as a platform, but I get the impression that a lot of .NET shops tend to be toxic in this particular way. .NET attracts bigcorps — and I don't really that they're toxic. Working in a big enterprise environment is actually fine most of the time. But because .NET attracts bigcorps, .NET also attracts development agencies that mostly want to work with bigcorps — i.e. agencies whose sales process is designed around attracting and retaining solely enterprise customers. These agencies market to middle-managers' needs to check checkboxes and satisfy scrum tasks; and then they skate indefinitely in their contracts on a basis of "shoddy work in bounded time" and infinite make-work extensions. These "enterprise agencies" exist to deliver internal political value for the people hiring them, rather than delivering any business value for the company as a whole. (As such, they mostly get hired by bigcorps that are themselves dysfunctional in some way. But there's enough of those to keep quite a lot of these agencies in business.) In agencies like this, I find that the only people who stay working there, are either burn-outs trying to keep their heads down and take home a paycheck, or some flavor of awful people. If you want to avoid this kind of experience in the future, I'd highly suggest either focusing your search for enterprise-y language shops on actual enterprises rather than agencies — or marketing yourself for your talents in less enterprise-y languages, to shift your appeal more toward SMB employers. |