The Zuulcat Archives

This post started as a reply to "CEO Friday: Why we don’t hire .NET programmers" by David over on the Expensify blog but it got so large that I decided to turn it into a blog post instead.

I work at tretton37, we work mostly on the .NET platform and sells .NET and Agile expertise to clients that value skill, personally I really don't care if someone has .NET on their resume or not, it doesn't tell me anything about who they are as a developer.

David made several statements that I don't agree with and I'll try to give my opinion on these things. I won't go in to the whole language/platform rant since it seems to have been discussed over and over again and David has clarified this "typo". But I will add to the discussion that .NET is a platform developed by Microsoft however it is in itself larger than Microsoft. Not admitting this is an insult to the Mono, MonoTouch and MonoDriod people and many more.

That said, I think that David is focusing too much on the language/platform. Great developers come in all shapes and sizes and to these people tooling (language/platform/IDE) does not matter. They are professional enough to look at a problem and suggest a solution using the most efficient tool. Most of them know several languages and platforms and would not choose a sub-standard tool.

I myself am proficient in several languages and platforms including Ruby and C++. While I love the speed Ruby on Rails gives me in development I am (mostly) constricted to database driven web apps. If you try to do anything else, well that won't work for you. ASP.NET MVC takes a bit more time to get started and development is a bit slower but on the other hand I would say it is more flexible albeit constricted to the MS platform. I guess what I'm trying to say is that every platform/framework has pros and cons and there is no black and white.

Also platform matters in post development, even if the .NET version took longer time to develop. Ubuntu + Nginx + Phusion Passenger has caused me a lot more grief than Windows + IIS. I'm sorry to say it and I wish it wasn't true but it is.

I have almost 10 years of professional experience and 8 of those where spent doing .NET (2 years C++). Dump me in the wilderness with a Swiss army knife and I'll cook you up a squirrel, hell I know MIPS assembly! But given an out-in-the-wilderness scenario my first choice probably would not be .NET.

Why choose .NET? .NET is a rather flexible and productive platform that solves certain problems in certain eco systems very well, not choosing .NET in these cases would be unprofessional.

Is it good for start-ups? I really don't know. My theory is that one problem for start-ups might be that they can't afford it. You need Windows, Visual Studio, Windows Server, SQL Server, etc. All that costs money, money you could be spending elsewhere. Ubuntu, Vim, Nginx, Passenger, etc are free. Even with BizSpark and WebSpark choosing an MS stack is still more expensive in terms of how efficiently you use your hardware (Yes! The same hardware will be able to serve much more PHP driven pages on Apache than .NET pages on IIS).

So measuring idea to cash value stream, which one is more efficient for you? What choice will save you money in the end?

If you only take away one thing from this it's that the tools don't make the developer. It's a completely different set of skills and if you can't learn new tools in a jiffy then you're not good enough yet. If you had bad experience with hiring developers that have .NET on their resume and getting them on board with another technology you probably have a too lax hiring process that doesn't check for the right skill set.

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Shameless plug: We at tretton37 are also hiring! We are looking for more skilled .NET professionals that like having fun. Read more about how it is to work with us. Ping me or apply directly to [email protected].