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by spamizbad 4452 days ago
"Career-limiting" != No Career.

Here in Chicago, .NET jobs pay less than other technologies. A RoR developer with 4 years of experience probably earns as much as a .NET dev with 8. If that .NET dev is lucky.

Most of the .NET job listings I get recruiter spammed with are for enterprise development things from companies whos primary "product" isn't technology. So if you work for them, you're working in a cost center and will be treated as such.

Edit: By the way, there's always been a shortage of .NET developers for as long as I can remember- even going back to '04 and '05 when the industry was starting to recover. But the salaries always trailed even then. You could make 5-10K more doing Java work in those days. No clue why.
4 comments
adron 4452 days ago
Yup, exactly. That's another nuance of what I'm hitting at in the blog entry. This is the case in a lot of big cities with big corp gigs. They're just dead end gigs. If that's all somebody wants, that's awesome. Learn .NET or Java and get that shit. But if somebody wants a bit more or a bit of freedom or a bit of changing scenery, one has to step outside of that. :)
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monksy 4452 days ago
As someone who has looked for Java positions in Chicago. Those seem to be shrinking. Everywhere I look is Ruby this ruby that. Also, there seem to be a fair bit of .NET positions available.

The big 2: Groupon and Grubhub use it. But not many other startups do.

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lugg 4452 days ago
Why I love ecom so much. All the cost center freedoms but you're still treated like a product producer.
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bananas 4452 days ago
I market myself as a Microsoft stack technical architect in the UK. I'm equally as good with clang, python, Linux, postgres and redis as well. However the pay for that stuff is shit here and the utility of it isn't great. Most paying work is gluing things that already exist together and due to inevitable economic decisions and functionality sets, Microsoft is already in those places.

General logic in employment: pick a well paying niche and milk it.

.Net is a great platform if someone else is paying for it and you (usually as a function of the business) but if you're responsible for funding it, no banana - other stacks are more cost efficient.

If there's no .net market, it is usually that the area is technically immature (startups rather than large stable businesses).

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