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.Net Programmers Fall in CNN's Top 5 In-Demand
GT_Alias writes "CNN Money is reporting that .Net programmers are one of the top 5 most in-demand jobs. Of the positions where recent surveys have indicated a labor shortage, .Net developers and QA analysts are the two that fell under the 'technology' category. According to CNN Money, .Net developers can make between $75-85K starting out in major cities, with the potential to make 15% more if they have a particular proficiency. Additionally, QA workers can make $65-75K a year with the ability to negotiate a 10-15% pay jump if they switch jobs. How does this information compare with the Slashdot crowd's real-world experience?"
It must be because I can only program Java. *sigh*
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Where should I go to start learning .Net programming? I need some good skills as I'm just looking for my first IT job now. Should I turn to the evil Microsoft for training in .Net or elsewhere??
From TFA: "Microsoft's software programming language .NET"
.NET's a platform or function library if you will not a programming language. Not getting your facts straight doesn't inspire me to have a lot of confidence.
Also, I see a lot of new QA jobs emphasizing programming skills, thus driving up the wages. These days, excellent QA organizations will devote at least 50% of their efforts towards automation, either by building their own suites or leveraging off-the-shelf solutions. This is good for QA folk who eventually want to migrate into development, as they'll gain valuable skills along the way.
Are we talking ASP.Net? Are we talking SQL Server 2005 c# stored procedures gurus? Are we talking J# Nhibernate & Nant wizards? Could we possibly be talking about .NET Portable CLR professionals designing VOIP applications for Windows Mobile 2005?
Honestly, wihtout specifying the phrase ".NET Developers" more precisely the discussion will become meaningless.
My POV: a new college graduatre who can barely create encapsulated objects is not going to be pulling the same money as a Java turned C# enterprise framework analyst who writes the patterns published in those clever books.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security - Ben Franklin
Since when did programming languages (C#, VB .NET) that a blind monkey missing three fingers could learn to program in pay high salaries? Bah. Blame it on point haired bosses (think Dilbert) who just want to incorperate the newest technology without understanding the benefits.
Never underestimate the stupidity of large groups (the employers) of people. .net is just a freaking platform, its not like it is anything special, just another language that just depends on different things. Offers very little that most other languages offer in much the same way.
Why isn't something that's more portable (perl/python) in such demand? Really bakes my noodle.
Why UNIX?
The article says you can earn big bucks if you know the 'dot net' language. Trouble is, there's no such thing (unless you count MSIL, which you don't).
A whole bunch of langauges actually target the dotNet runtime (c#, visualbasic.net, j#, etc). My guess is that after a few years of head-in-the-sand, a metric crapload of legacy visual basic projects suddenly need porting to a platform with a future.
I've been brainwashed by slashdot users and most of the IT crowd on the Internet to go ahead and learn open source languages and applications and not to learn .NET, as it is Micoshit.
.NET.
To my surprise, the IT crowd with the big voices on the net are not in-tune with reality.
Most of the jobs out there require you to use
I'm a C#/.NET developer here in Australia, been doing C# for the last 5 years within a diverse range of industries. Prior to that I was a C++ dev for about 12 years. Before the dotcom crash I was on a 6-figure salary, now as a C# hack I earn about the lower end of the figures quoted - in Australian dollars (about 3/4 the value of US dollars).
One thing though, I got sick of the constant crap in C++ just spending more time on the stupid COM plumbing and myriad datatypes than actual applications work. Going to C# was a damn breath of fresh air. I LOVE it. I can actually get useful shit done that does stuff for the END USER of the the product and after all that's what the company pays me for. Perhaps I should just move to the US but with the god-bothering, shootings and rampant intake of GE food I think I'll give it a miss thanks. Oh and the lack of more than a week or two holidays... gackkk.
As rule of thumb, may be it is better for you to invert in general Computer Science formation (generic OS, compiler understanding, computer architecture, algorithmic complexity, et al), not just the "follow the last wave formation". Most people doesn't ever consider that it is dangerous to be extremely especialized. This applies to any platform-specific developing environment.
In the long way, you'll have to switch between many OS, compilers, languages, etc. Sometimes you have to be pragmatic, just to pay the bills, but take conscience about that the IT field is very variable in the surface, but sound in the fundamentals. This is why I recommend generic Computer Science formation when young people ask me for an advice (plus some other "last wave" preparation, just in case).
Where I used to work, I was the only PHP/MySQL guy, and although I'm paid within the .NET range, all of our .NET guys were making 30k+ more than me and when some of them quit, they found jobs that paid ~20% MORE, while when I landed my new job, I'm stuck at some sort of ceiling....
There is very little legacy .NET code out there, and if you're writing new code, why lock your client into a platform? My shop uses PHP or whatever other open technology fits the bill. Only one guy in the shop knows anything about .NET, and he's not a fan of it. I don't intend to waste my time learning it, because it's dead-end technology for a dying platform.
I'm in the (un)fortunate position of seeing .Net and J2EE being used sideby side in the same application, and I don't get why people are using .Net in the enterprise. It can't be because CLR is faster than the JVM, it isn't. It may be fair to say that, for a bog standard application, .Net development is faster (Visual Studio is an excellent tool), but as soon as you start to push its framework (as all real applications do) the .Net teams fall behind the J2EE teams.
.Net and, if your on a budget, everything can be got for free. Need support? Buy WebLogic or JBoss support. Need training? Sun are more than happy to oblige. Need developers? You can't spit without hitting a J2EE developer. Need the source code? Sun will hand it over, for free, just don't expect any changes you made to be put back into the source tree, or them to give you any slack if you try and distribute at all - its not the freedom that OSS would like to give you, but its better than .Net.
.Net developers. If I was starting out in software development again, I'd be still be looking to start in Java, and expect to move over to Ruby on Rails (or whatever is flavor of the month) in 5 to 10 years. Assuming people who make IT descisions get smarter, and OSS continues to get stronger, I can't see how any company selling enterprise grade software will be selling anything but the time and experiance of their staff sans the licencing fees of the tools and server software to their customers. How else will western developers compete with China and India?
Java gives you choice. Choice of IDE, choice of framework, choice of application server and perhaps most importantly choice of platform. All that and it runs as fast as
So is it any wonder that there are less
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
Interesting, this past week there was another article about the potential for elimination of QA staff due to agile programming techniques:
a d_id=38785
.NET positions too, although I don't think it is any stronger than the increase in Java positions. The demand for software developers has really picked up, and, just informally from the ones I have talked to, most head hunters are reporting being overloaded with opportunities to place people, as much as a 250% increase in demand for people over a few months ago.
http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thre
Software quality management is maturing into a discipline unto itself, and becoming much broader than testing. Manual testing is being replaced by automated tools.
Up here in Canada, I have seen an increase in the number of
FREE - Java, J2EE and Ajax Audiobooks for Software Developers - www.DeveloperAdvantage.com
Windows and/or
What list/article were you looking at?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Let me guess: they can't find programmers with 10 years .NET-experience?
A language that is easy to learn does not guarantee good code.
Even the worst logic or options can be generated from the best languages. Some lovely examples can be found over heres.
We wanted you dead anyway.
The demand for .NET programmers won't last. It's foolish to build life around a Microsoft technology when global anti-MS sentiment is exploding. You won't see me out there being a prostitute for MS. Don't rush onto a sinking ship.
Yes you will make those salaries.. IF and only if you have the background and years of experience.
By background i mean 3 thiered knowledge, application life cycles..etc
and have a few large corporate project behind you.
Don't think for an instant you will get those amount of dollars for just
knowing VB,C#,ASP.net
Same applies to any language btw.
My advice is this, start small, get good projects that has the potential to be completed behind you and build up on that, your position will evolve naturally into corporate type programing in no time!
I'm learning VB .NET for school and o far it seems pretty useless. A friend and I have to make a voting application for the school. We consistently get Secuity Esception Errors when trying to access the database. And our teacher practically banned us from using a cgi application.
I hate .NET
Weeks of coding save hours of planning
Visual Basic .NET, C# .NET, ASP .NET, ...
What the article says is that Windows Programmers Fall in CNN's Top 5 In-Demand.
My city: Barcelona.
Damn that i burnt all my mod points this morning. This is EXACTLY what I'm doing right now, as part of my master thesis. For all the Swedes out there, that already have some programming skills, I would strongly recommend reading Anders Forsberg - Programmering i C#. It concentrates on the parts making C# different from other languages and cuts the crap out. Add to that some kind of .NET Framework overview book, and you should have what it takes to get at least decent on your own.
Also, Visual Studio isn't a good IDE - it's a great one (especially compared to some of Microsoft's other software offerings). And I'm usually in the *nix crowd. Possibly vim or emacs are better, but they have a really high entrance barrier...
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
What list/article were you looking at?
He don't need no stinking lists! He once talked to a guy who once sat next to a guy who's brother read the VS.NET EULA! Live and in person!!! 'nuff said! Do not question his authoritaaaaa!
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
The might of all the software houses, big multinationals with internal development teams, consulting companies around the world, goverments, etc., have not smelled the coffee about a language that will make them more productive.
But you have.
Paint me unimpressed.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
^ This post contains exactly zero insight, but yet has been moderated to Score 5 insightful.
and .Net is one of the vendor specific ways to do SOA. And SOA is popular with all the vendors because (suprise! suprise!) it's so bloody inefficient. You can sell tons of hardware and consulting services on SOA's coattails.
I am graduating this spring from a major state university in the south. In our program we have learned such things as C, C++, PHP, Perl, Ruby(currently learning), Java, Javascript, and various other things in the Unix/Debain Linux environment. It was recommended by the Managing Principal of a software consulting firm that I learn the .NET suite on my own. Since I have done so and put C#.NET,ADO.NET, and ASP.NET on my resume the interest in my skills has gone up considerably. Just about every interview I go on now the employer is mainly interested in my .NET knowledge. I have found that the automatic code generation in VS 2005 allows me to spend more time on security and correct by design (not correct by testing).
I'm sure Windows will be with us for a long time, but I'm also pretty sure that .NET won't.
Remember COM+, ActiveX, etc.? Every 3-4 years Microsoft comes out with their latest interfaces, buzzwords, etc. In a few years MS will be moving from Visual Fred to Visual Jake, and everybody will be doing backflips to migrate their legacy code.
Is it time to retire some of those COBOL/CSIS mainframes? Sure.
Do we need to rewrite every application we own just because it is more than three years old? No...
A lot of shops still have VB6 sitting around because of the large number of difficult-to-port applications. How many people have GCC v2 lying around for hard-to-compile C apps? Almost none, since the GNU folks are half-decent about backwards compatibility in their development tools. When things break it tends to be minor - as it should be for a programming language.
The bottom line is that programmers shouldn't have to jump through hoops every time MS wants to sell more development stuido licenses, or needs to attract media attention...
Furniture repairman at Microsoft.
Aside from any of the language issues, ASP.NET provides a really productive environment for web app development. At least for projects of a certain size, ASP.NET is much cheaper/faster to develop for than J2EE, and the resulting code is generally pretty clean and easy to maintain. Java has all this heavy infrastructure for large applications (Struts, Spring, Enterprise Beans), but result is that it's uncompetitive for the small-to-midsized ones.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
I worked for a company that made the decision in 2003 to move towards .Net platform and C#, after evaluating Java / Websphere. .Net can give better performance than Java, and the group was able to produce results. In fact, the group that started the .Net initiative at this company ended up having the rest of application development use their model to update their skills and design concepts, even the small group of VAX programmers who were still around saw the potential in this technology and started writing interfaces as web services.
Getting results is what matters, not some purist ideology, marketing hype, or fanboy attitude. After all, programmers and analysts job is to build systems and applications to meet business needs, not a self fulfilling desire.
"22 astronauts were born in Ohio. What is it about your state that makes people want to flee the Earth?" Stephen Colbert
Oh, and the bit about "dying platform" is particularly insightful.
I bet most of the .NET code and jobs out there are either from people who were playing around with the language for a bit and wrote some useful code that now needs maintenance, or is there because of some stupid mandate to use Microsoft technology.
.NET/C# is a language for programmers who are at least mediocre. Unlike VB, it's not a language for the masses of poor programmers who's real job is something else. So, why would any programmer who was any good bother to learn some language that's going to enslave them to one company's technology forever. It's senseless.
So, it makes perfect sense that it's hard to find .NET programmers out there.
And don't tell me about GNOME mono. That project will be killed in some way by Microsoft as soon as Microsoft thinks it's in their advantage to do so. It's just a much a dead-end as .NET.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Take any valued development skill like Java, C#, Oracle or SQL Server and add a few years of practical business knowledge such as securities trading, financial analysis or international taxation and these salaries can easily be doubled. I've seen hedge funds in my area looking for C# developers with securities trading system knowledge willing to pay $120k to $150k.
There is a lot of money to be had if you can understand business people and turn there needs into tools and applications quickly.
WARNING: WE HAVE NOT CONDUCTED A FELONY-CONVICTION SEARCH OR FBI SEARCH ON THIS INDIVIDUAL.
I brought up Visual Studio .NET and in the "New Project" dialog, you can have a C++.NET project. I've never just taken old Windows C++ code and tried to make it into some sort of .NET app, but I'm sure it woulnd't be hard at all.
I guess of you're under a dealine, and you need to start moving over to a new platform, you'd have no choice but to take any short-cut you can.
I am a .Net developer and I don't where I can go to make 75k - 85k developing in .Net, I know of positions managing .Net developers for that amout but I haven't seen an actual development position that pays that amount.
And unfortunately, the guy we ended up hiring had lied on his resume about his 2 years of .NET experience... he was hoping to learn "on the job" as it were, and we ended up having to fire him and rewrite all the code he had written, which was, of course, awful.
The title reads as if .NET programmers are loosing ground. Why slashdot, why?
"Never underestimate the stupidity of large groups (the employers) of people. .net is just a freaking platform, its not like it is anything special, just another language that just depends on different things. Offers very little that most other languages offer in much the same way."
I feel the same way about Linux. It's just another "freaking" OS. Guess I shouldn't underestimate the stupidity of the OSS crowd.
I'm working now in a startup phase of an enterprise. I am concentrating on Java, PHP, and other OSS stuff. The reason os so that if I'm using a vendor who I end up not liking, I can pick up and move to another. I don't want to be trapped in the MS world. I've seen some of the corp licensing requirements by MS and the costs of doing business on that platform is only going to increase.
See, I think you know more than enough to get one of these amazing jobs.
I like the .Net CLR alright, it serves my purposes well. Outside of large corporations I have yet to find a client who is interested in a java solution for anything. Most people's experience with java is limited to bad web pages, so the view is tainted. This carries through to most busineses. It's ignorance, yes. But honestly, how many people/companies that need an application know or care how it works--as long as it does the job?
If you're writing window's gui apps, .NET is the way to go. Not surprising one bit that this ability is in high demand...
td
hard core geek-ware
I'm willing to take a considerable slash in starting pay in order to say NO to proprietary technology. I know it's foolish, but that's just how I feel. I must resist the Borg.
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The only people who would dispute the superiority of Visual Studio, C# and ASP.NET would be those who've never spent more than 2 hours in any of them. And that was just .NET 1.x :) .NET 2.0 is like stepping into a time machine and move 10 years ahead of anything else out there.
The thread is about the .NET programming market. Not why you think Java is better. But, hey, you're badmouthing the evil Microsoft so you're at +5.
The MBA in marketing is probably about market research and product development, which is much different than Madison Avenue, sell-you-what-you-don't-want marketing, which is what I suspect you're thinking about.
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See, the thing is: these days, real-world programming skill is not about the language anymore, it's about the libraries. You may be able to switch from Java to C# in a few days, but knowing the libraries inside out is going to take a lot longer.
I've been a VB.Net developer since it was .Net beta, and am fluent in C# as well. Top that off with proficiency with SQL/ADO.Net and database architecture, and I'm pretty ripe for the picking.
:(
Too bad I can't find time to find a better job, and am only pulling in 62k
These writers don't know anything.
I had a cuple problems with Visul Basic, and my apps never run right. If .NET is easier than VB I think I will lern it so I can make those big bucks.
I know it's not popular here, but I'm a .NET developer for a small contracting company, and all I know is there is more work than we can handle. On top of that, there are alot of people writing bad .NET code. As for resources, MSDN, FxCop, and Brad Abram's Framework Design Guidelines would start you out on the right foot.
Well, .NET runs on Windows using Microsoft's .NET implementation, and on Unix and OS X using Mono's implementation. That's an acceptable level of being locked to a platform for most people.
Remains to be seen how the situation will fare in the near future.
More than mere navel gazing.
Alright, I'm addicted to the easy joke. Mod him down if you really want to.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
What you're describing is Financial Engineering, which you can get a Master's degree for in one year from several programs (Columbia, Berkeley, Rutgers, to name a few). I don't think merely understanding trading is enough, there is a lot of very advanced math involved:
(%i1) factor(777353);
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One of the shortest, if not the shortest mention of the things mentioned in the artical, were these two tech jobs.
.net is a platform that many langauges can be use on and perhaps mixed to some degree..(as opposed to saying programmers of a specific language are in demand -- wasn't java once there?).... and the other position in demand being Quality assurance in software....
.net platform and say . MS net developers are in demand..... well all things considered... don't you then need more QA's......trusted computing and all???
.net platform is so great, wouldn't that make QA less needed?
And consider that
Do you suppose there is a relationship?
Like as in if you are going to put programmers of different languages on the
Seems like if there is a splitting of jobs for the output, the pay would be split too....
maybe thats a little off the edge.... but really if the
What bothers me about all of this is that programming isn't getting much easier for the typical user, as it should be.
Programming is the act of automating complexity so as to make that complexity easy to use and reuse byt he user of the complexity. And this is recursive.
But I suppose to distort this so to keep it out of the typical users hands enough, supporting the industry as some would say, requires complexication before it goes out....need another hand on the light bulb ladder? Hmmm, what happens whan I flip this switch while they are all changing the bulb? Trust me, if you want me to trust you.....
Remember COM+, ActiveX, etc.? Every 3-4 years Microsoft comes out with their latest interfaces, buzzwords, etc. In a few years MS will be moving from Visual Fred to Visual Jake, and everybody will be doing backflips to migrate their legacy code.
.NET will be around for a number of years still, and not "dying" today. (heck, MS is even actively supporting it today more than ever, so it's a great exaggeration)
.NET being largely incompatible with regular C++ development, and the upcoming WinFX API being largely incompatible with even more things, like UI development (XAML vs regular resource files).
Yep, I agree about this, but also this:
A lot of shops still have VB6 sitting around because of the large number of difficult-to-port applications.
MS technologies and their communities tend to linger for quite a while due to the company size. For better and worse, to the developers. And when I'm talking about "dying" stuff, I'm talking about dying communities, not the inventing company moving on. For that reason I'm not really saying the Amiga is dead even now, as there's still a lot of enthusiasts around. I'm usually not claiming the Pentium 3 is dead the day Intel went to Pentium 4, and so on. But sure, it depends on how you look at it. But community-wise, I believe
But I agree with what you're saying that MS is moving on in a kind of annoying fashion these days. Especially incompatibility is a pretty big problem, with
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Joel could easily have been talking about .net or .java or .latest-easy-to-write-language. He hit the nail on the head when he said that (to paraphrase) teaching people using a language which avoids the requirement to understand how computers actually work makes it hard to assess whether a programmer is any good.
Joel's the Perils of Java School
When I used to work in embedded systems (oh gosh, 12 years ago!) I was stunned to discover that some of my colleagues didn't understand how to write interrupt routines and thought they were black magic! I can see why, although jobs are not often advertised, linux kernel programmers get a very high premium salary - because so many software engineers don't even have an insight into memory allocation strategies and stacks, let alone assembler and interrupts.
Sorry to rant, but I gotta justify the grey hairs somehow!
A lot of people here seem to bash .NET, but they don't really seem to know much about it and are really not talking truths about it. Just bashing it for the sack of bashing it, funny that
You guys keep your PHP, Java what ever, and well use our beloved .NET
I spent many years hammering out COM components in C, C++, and later ATL. Management tended to look at it as 'hard magic', when in reality it was really no harder than the C++ code we were cooking up for the Unix systems. As things migrated to a web front end where ASP was calling COM, I looked for a bit easier way to test my bug free (TM) code. Found that it was easier to use a VB test client than IIS. Also found that I could prototype a COM component in VB very quickly... which ran faster (if apartment threading worked for the situation and was compiled) than I cared to admit.
.NET suffers from the same mentality. Sure, I've played with it a bit. It was very simple to jump into C# from Java, they had a fairly rich set of core libraries. Microsoft keeps pitching it as 'easy' and I suspect there are too many folks krufting out C# apps rather than crafting them, thus my perception is this new framework does not have a high enough barrier of entry. My assumption is the money will follow the same pattern. That, and the .NET framework is also a bit young. I've worked with a lot of companies, and those few who are making the jump to .NET started in 2005/2004. No 'bleeding edge' bonus money over other platforms/frameworks. Why would I move to it?
Someone who is a solid developer can create good clean code - even in VB. The problem I saw was the folks paying the bills would think that 'VB is easy' and would pay less. When I made the switch to Java, I felt it was C++ for dummies. As things picked up steam and the J2EE specs raised the bar again on what you had to know to make an application work. That is what I view as the Achilles heel to the older VB platform - folks who had no clue what they were doing could wire together an app. (All the normal caveats here, some of the ugliest code I've ever reviewed and then had to fix was done in Java. Tis the people, not the language, more often than not.)
Anyhow, I think
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Seriously, any high paying IT job will be "financially corrected" by using H1B workers or outsourcing. Just ask all of the MCSEs that "have starting salaries of 70K" as listed on the radio commercials 7 years ago.
Anyone who confuses unit testing with QA shouldn't be developing software.
(Sorry, I'm not going to summarize a couple of decades of SWEng experience for Slashdot, just do more reading on the subject.)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
This is what I'm doing right now for my senior project at my college. I got myself a FREE copy of VB.NET Express and 20+ FREE training videos. It's only for a limited time though. MS will eventually start charging about $50 for an Express license. You can also find C#, C++, J#, Web Developer, and SQL Server for free. Just click the appropriate links on the left of either of the two links mentioned above.
-Ares
The real skill that a programmer needs if he or she is going to make it is adaptability. Stop thinking in terms of languages, period. At the core, unless you're having to do some pretty wild coding, most work pretty much the same. Think in terms of projects. If you're a freelancer, you'll want to have your finger in lots of pies, and if you're an in-house programmer, well, you know, the boss man is going to tell you what you're coding in. Flex the conceptual skills, because last week it was Delphi and VB, yesterday it was Java, today it's .Net, tomorrow it will be Ruby, and who the hell knows what next week will bring.
Like it or not, the programmer is just as much a slave to consumerism as anyone else, though it comes from a different angle. Managers and customers are sold platforms and languages by marketing guys (you know, the kinds of guys that get these sorts of articles planted in CNN), and you're going to have to adapt. It's really sucky, but that's the nature of the game. It's not like the olden days where a guy could learn Cobol and have a job until he dropped dead into the card reader.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
But nobody, realy think there has realy exists .... so who cares about "in-demand parade" ?
.net hype survive, when it just appear that nobody think anymore that .net is anything but Java ;-)
Here, repairmain is also Top 1 In-Deman, but does it means my repair man will be smart ?
All I can see is that MS spin-off are trying to make the
Sorry, but we trust in facts.
I gotta say finding decent professional QA people is rather difficult. At my particular company we require some coding skills and a strong security background. For every hire we interview about 40 people who 'have' passed an initial phone screening. Sr QA people with a strong security and 'ok' coding background can be making upwards of 80k. Just this year I got a 12% pay increase, and a 5k bonus. Yes I work in a windows shop and we 'happen' to be using c#/.net for our products.
"I know it's not popular here, but I'm a .NET developer for a small contracting company, and all I know is there is more work than we can handle."
Don't apologize for the bigoted attitudes of others. You don't hear people starting a sentence with: "I know it's not popular here, but I'm a black person", "I know it's not popular here, but I'm a Muslim", "I know it's not popular here, but I'm a gay". They don't have a right to make you feel bad because you don't make the same decisions they make. Stand up and be counted as an equal in the "blind" world of geekdom.
Did it ever strike you that the "legacy Windows app" might have been one of the least stable buzzword compliant flavors ever? Compare the changes required from Win3.1, 95, 98, NT, and XP to GNU/Linux applications. The people who fell for VB have it even worse and they are the ones forking out the big bucks all the time to "keep up". An application ported to GNU/Linux in 1998 would have worked on commodity hardware then and now with a minimum of fuss and upkeep, even if they used something quick and dirty like Tcl/Tk. It's that TCO thing again.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
When I was working at Mattel in the mid 90s, the IT department was paying a lot of old guys a great deal of money to keep their ancient Cobol code running and revised for Y2K. Could it be that with the trend of business and governments away from being chained to Microsoft products that finding people to support the old habits is getting tougher? Or is it possible that no college or university EVER teaches currently marketable skills and only teach stuff that's several years out of date? Hell, when I was at B.U. there was a big focus on teaching Ada and we poor starving graduates discovered that nobody was hiring Ada programmers anymore.
".NET/C# is a language for programmers who are at least mediocre"
.NET/C# for a living. Why? And why is it a language for mediocre programmers? It simply have a higher level of abstracion then say C. And using tools whit high abstracion level makes you a bad programer? I'm sorry but i don't get. What about Java then? Is it not the same thing? Why this elitism?
.NET."
.net have you? I will develop for linux the ns there is a framework as STABLE and fresh as .net for it! And MONO is a god send!
I'm trying to make sence of you post but i can't. Why are you lashing out? It's almost as you are jealous of the peopel that write
"bother to learn some language that's going to enslave them to one company's technology forever. It's senseless."
The thing is that you don't have to. If you know the basic consept of OO your good to go.
"It's just a much a dead-end as
You never tried
Two tech jobs in high demand these days are .NET (dot net) developers and quality assurance analysts.
No mysteries here. Obviously, a company that uses many of the first needs even more of the second and other support. The base pay $65,000 is your average big dumb company salary because everything cost two to three times as much as it should for them. Only big dumb companies, aka Microsoft Partners, would be moving to the latest and greatest M$ junk, so this spike in demand is predictable. The eventual disposal of this batch of soon to be squeezed of their lives programmers is also predictable. M$ will upgrade train their skills into irrelevance two years from now and a new wave of hiring will be on, and so on ad infinitum.
People using other software are quietly using their existing staff, having lives, going on vacation, etc, etc. They hire every now and then.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I have been working in NYC hiring developers that do C# development at the expert developer level for some time now. I am currently working for a boutique consulting firm .. Finetix (http://www.finetix.com/) .. doing software development for the major investment banks and hedge funds in NYC and London mostly. They do Java and .Net development - and the .Net pull is STRONG. We cannot hire enough STRONG developers. I have been interviewing developers for full time and/ or consulting positions for the better part of the last 4 years in the NYC area. The market for software devlopers that can program C# is very strong right now. A friend and collegue of mine posted last week on his blog http://magmasystems.blogspot.com/ that the baseline salary for strong C# AND Java devs in NYC area is ~150k$. I agree with this. I can say that companies want C# devs for building DESKTOP APPLICATIONS in the major banks, funds etc. Swing does not cut it yet - sorry. VB is old and dead. I hate to break the news to all you Flamer Style OSS or die slashdotters - but MS makes a great programming model for building insanely rich desktop applications.On top of that EVERYONE IN MOST PLACES HAS A WINDOWS DESKTOP. Traders that make millions of dollars doing what they do DO NOT WANT WEB APPLICATIONS. They need RICH desktop applicaions (always N tier communicating with web services, message queues etc.). There is a super strong need for REAL software developers (not ASP kiddies or VBers just awakened). That all said - I am typing all this on my laptop running linux, I can code in C# as an expert, Java at the mid level - I can program Ruby some as well as some C++, and lots more. I can say that having lead teams of developers - YOU CAN DO AN AMAZING AMOUNT with C# and .Net. I have led teams to build both the 30th and the 60th busiest sites on the web for a former client - all .Net/ C#. It works. I have seen one after another huge class desktop/ N tier 'smart client' application be build succesfully using .Net on the client at least. It works. It pays the bills. Do not discount or flame it as it shows you do not understand it. Accept that C#/ .Net is here - it is ready for the enterprise. People are making great money doing it.
Enough ramble from me;
Chris
" I have no tag line. "
"We consistently get Secuity Esception Errors when trying to access the database."
.NET, but please don't blame MS for you inability to code like a professional.
What you're saying is that:
a) You don't know what you're doing
b) You don't even know how to look up error codes
c) and you can't fix your own bugs.
I may not be a fan of
anyone need a C or Java programmer? lol
who would have taught few years ago that Java programmers be a dying breed?
Some here have mentioned that they don't see the $75k - $85+k salaries? Maybe not where you work, but they are indeed available in the Boston area. Perhaps the cost of living inflates these salaries by 10%, but the number of C# and VB.NET job postings around here have been on the rise for the last 18 months. Now, each week, the postings are numerous - and not the bogus recruiter postings, but actual companies hungry for intermediate to experienced developers and SW Engineers.
There are also plenty of Java postings. I'm sure those salaries are at the same levels. A lot of financial services type positions lately. Probably a lot of market analysis projection tools being built....
I have a university degree in CS and have been working in the industry for about a decade now... and I REFUSE to work with anything Microsoft related. I would not take a job because of it and I will quit a job that introduces it later.
More jobs for the shmoo's who have no personal integrity... good... I don't f*cking care!
Death to Microsoft!
Meh.
My employer had all of it's products written in VB6, and when .Net came out learned a hard lesson about dealing with Microsoft. Rather than porting to .Net we are now a Java shop.
It has been used since the early days of the Web to write CGI scripts, and is an integral component of the popular LAMP (Linux / Apache / MySQL / (Perl / PHP / Python)) platform for web development. Perl has been called "the glue that holds the web together". Large projects written in Perl include Slash, early implementations of PHP [1], and UseModWiki, the wiki software used in Wikipedia until 2002. ... New features have been added, yet virtually complete backwards compatibility with earlier versions is maintained.
So, if Perl is good enough to manage Slashdot and Wiki, I imagine it's good enough to manage any "enterprise" site and is very much worth knowing.
People are indeed hiring people who know perl. There might not be a spike in demand like there is in the non free world, where all the "partners" move lock step, but the jobs are there. I like the way Wall put it, "What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the sound of a wall that people have stopped banging their heads against?" Companies that don't mind spending lots of money will continue to persue .NET, C#, M$whatever, and crack lots of heads doing it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You are already selling out and going with .NET, what difference would it make if you train with Microsoft?
/me spits at .NET and MS
Meh.
Anyone here work as a hardware programmer?
How much do they make?
who would have taught few years ago that Java programmers be a dying breed?
.NET. The next day, only senior developers with experience can get jobs, and the day after, junior coders are taking away all the highly-paid jobs. The day after, something else. After you've gone through twenty or so claimed crises for the IT industry on Slashdot's front page, you kind of mellow out and just grin and go on your way when you see articles of this sort.
.NET. :-)
There are no "dying breeds" in the sense that you can't do work and get recompensed. Hell, if you *want* to build a web application in Fortran77 (it's just that it's probably kind of a pain in the ass), you can run out and do exactly that. Sure, not a very high *percentage* of people developing software anymore are going to be coding in F77, but the market's also expanded an awful lot from back when Fortran was the hottest thing going.
I keep seeing these various articles from the IT press about how "X" is the hot new area. [snort] If that area was the only place to be, developers would be skipping from language to language and technology to technology every two years (and never gain *any* aptitude in the area). In the grand scheme of things, most IT press have about a two out of ten on the cluefulness meter (I remember seeing one once directly rip a guess of mine as to the rate of Linux desktop adoption and slap it into a report, presented it as if it had research backing it), and about a one out of ten on the integrity meter ("Houston is a *great* place to live and work! It's the new hot center for highly-paid developers! -- I don't have *any* incentives being paid me by Houston business interests, no!")
I like developing in C, and I don't seem to have any trouble running work that needs to be done in (or can be done in) C. Unless you are specifically working for someone or a customer that has a precise language requirement and refuse to work anywhere else, you can do work in pretty much any language. Hell, Paul Graham is still out there using Lisp as a website backend...
My take is that the best way for one to make a good salary and have a good job is to learn a particular useful skillset really in-depth, ignore what Bob the Tech Journalist is screaming about being the latest hotness, and trust your own judgement as to what's technically sound.
And Slashdot runs plenty of "the sky is falling" articles about IT and the software development industry. One day, an article will claim that all software development is going to vanish to India. The next day, Microsoft is going to take over with
Actually, this article isn't even really *negative*. It just implies that we should be dropping everything and checking out
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Unless things have changed dramatically in the last year, I wouldn't count on that. Last year I took C# and VB.net. I couldn't even get simple "Hello World" apps built in Visual Studio to run in Mono. .NET=Further locked into Windows
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
Oh no! You mean this article was written by someone who (gasp!) has a degree in a subject area that focuses on reading and writing. The horror! We obviously can't trust a word then.
The research probably was doing a search on Monster.com and seeing how many "jobs" cames up (we all know how that works) and then this person probably talked to their friend who's heard how much (complete guess) her
Wow. What an amazing pile of steaming "probablys" and conjecture you got there. Do you have a single actual fact to cite anywhere here, or do you just feel the need to randomly try to discredit an article because it says that the dreaded Microsoft technology remains the most widespread skill set needed in the IT world?
These writers don't know anything.
As opposed to you who clearly are a sage oracle to be paid attention to.
Jeez.
Hey, more jobs for me. I don't care what you think.
VB/C#/ASP.NET developer
"I'm sure Windows will be with us for a long time, but I'm also pretty sure that .NET won't."
.NET framework.. Exchange, Office, BizTalk, SharePoint, CRM, etc. All of their verticles are normalizing on the same infrastructure to maximize interoperability between the platforms. .NET is here to stay... The fundamental mistake that you're making is that .NET is anything like COM+ or ActiveX. On the surface they seem to be similar in function, however if you dig a little deeper you will find some very fundamental differences in how the technologies are being used and what it means for the future of microsoft products.
You're fooling yourself if you think that is true. Microsoft's push to SOA includes putting all of their major application bases on the
Regardless, we ALL have choices and learning to use Microsoft technologies (.NET included) doesn't mean that you're stuck using them forever. I program in a variety of languages and platforms and I enjoy all of them; The lessons and concepts I learn are always applicable across the board.
is that most jobs are for intranets, and companies which want to pay for support. Open Source doesn't have that - at least here in Mexico. Here the most demanded programmers are .NET. The only company which uses LAMP is the company i belong to, and that's because I was allowed to choose which platform I would program in - and that's because my boss is an old friend of my father, of the old guard.
.NET and Java developers. There's no place in the mexican job market for open source coders like me :(
Most companies, however, have been convinced with Microsoft/Sun/IBM advertisements, and they're asking for
When you are applying for a job, at least in the consulting sector, they are not looking for specific languages you know at the moment, but if you are capable of learning something new when required. To have an impressive CV and a good education is paying off, not only knowing .Net or Java.
I have seen precisely why companies are having a hard time finding .NET developers. It's because companies choose to go with .NET technologies which are probably not the industry norm in their field (ie web development) and then try to recruit rsther than trying to see what the majority of the market is and what the majority of developers are using.
.NET platform but developers not following suit. It's easy to convince a company through hype but alot harder to convince engineers.
C# is still very low on the Tiobe Index wavering between 9-11 with only a 3% permeation of the market. By comparison, PHP and PERL both waver around 9% with C/C++ and JAVA being MUCH higher.
These shortages that companies are feeling is not so much the communities fault as it is the companies fault for deviating from what are commonly accepted coding languages for certain tasks.
Aside from C# not being widely adopted by developers yet (outside of the greater Seattle/Redmond area), Microsoft itself has only just not started porting applications to a large extent to C#. Before now, even they were still using C/C++ for most of their desktop applications (notice I said MOST to avoid anyone pointing out their favorite C# applicatioon).
In short, this shortage is mostly due to companies believing in Microsoft's hype of the
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Anyhow, I think .NET suffers from the same mentality. Sure, I've played with it a bit. It was very simple to jump into C# from Java, they had a fairly rich set of core libraries. Microsoft keeps pitching it as 'easy' and I suspect there are too many folks krufting out C# apps rather than crafting them, thus my perception is this new framework does not have a high enough barrier of entry. My assumption is the money will follow the same pattern. That, and the .NET framework is also a bit young. I've worked with a lot of companies, and those few who are making the jump to .NET started in 2005/2004. No 'bleeding edge' bonus money over other platforms/frameworks. Why would I move to it?
.sig). Traditionally, it was a pain in the ass to write a simple preemptively-multithreaded program. Java and .NET make it *much* easier to write that hello world thread program.
I know a lot of people who have the same frusteration over a lowered barrier to entry. Making something outright *easier* is just better (no sense in having to blow lots of time making people learn something unnecessary), but there is a problem when it's easy to enter a field but hard to perform in the field competently.
I've known a few people (who I consider to be overreacting) who actually dislike use of debuggers, because they feel that it makes people less likely to actually properly think through what they are developing. It lowers the barrier to entry a lot, and that the cost of that loss of a filter causes more harm than the overall benefits. One of these people is Linus Torvalds. Another is my current boss. While I think that they both go too far, there is a sizeable kernel of truth.
I think that the single largest irritation I have with some of the newer platforms is that they greatly lower the barrier to entry with threads (see my
The problem is that the syntax you must use and some trivial knowledge about what is safe to do and what isn't in a language or on a platform is the tiniest part of what must be known to correctly multithread a program. You *must understand how to correctly do multithreaded design* from the standpoint of designing a program. This is not easy to do correctly, and it's easy to take "shortcuts" that then come back and bite one in the ass. I would say that I have known maybe three or four people that I would trust to correctly write preemptively multithreaded systems that I'd be willing to trust my life to -- and in every single one of their cases, I've found nasty design-level bugs in their threaded or distributed designs that probably would not have cropped up in a simple single-threaded design.
Multithreading a a system has exactly two legitimate uses:
(1) Increasing performance. Unless you have a very specialized system designed for parallel processing, you are probably talking about possibly a factor of two speedup on a typical multiprocessor system. The problem is that a factor of two is *nothing*. You have a limited amount of development time T in which to make your application perform as quickly as possible. It's almost always possible to redesign such a system's higher-level logic (precompute, cache to avoid recomputation, better algorithms, whatever) to get at *least* a factor of two speed improvement on a CPU-bound application, and doing so is almost always cheaper in terms of development time than multithreading an application. Multithreading is damned expensive in terms of development time and debugging time. It makes profiling much more difficult. It is *not* immediately clear to a reader of your code what assumptions you make about the threading model; we developed data hiding for defining how data must be touched, but we have no good way at the language level for defining guarantees about how threads must interact. Result: you waste a lot of time for minimal performance gain.
(2) Ea
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I did QA for a year and I only got paid $15/hr. My full-time coworkers were most definitely not making nearly $65k/year and I worked at a relatively large company in San Diego, CA.
Forecast for tomorrow: A few sprinklings of genius with a chance of DOOM!
CNN Money is reporting that .Net programmers are one of the top 5 most in-demand jobs.
Sounds like an advertisement for Microsoft. Give Microsoft lots of money for useless training in Microsoft's proprietary development tool that they will totally change in a couple of years time. To back this up, I once did a rough estimate and found that Microsoft makes huge revenues from sales to developers.
Of the positions where recent surveys have indicated a labor shortage, .Net developers and QA analysts are the two that fell under the 'technology' category.
I don't want to ever label my skills under some narrow limited category.
According to CNN Money, .Net developers can make between $75-85K starting out in major cities, with the potential to make 15% more if they have a particular proficiency. Additionally, QA workers can make $65-75K a year with the ability to negotiate a 10-15% pay jump if they switch jobs.
Oh, wait unless you are going for a job in India or China then these salary estimates are high. For North American and European cities, these salary quotes for seem low to me. Sounds like the recruiters that wrote this story (or paid to have it written) are being optimistic in their own interests.
Anyways, I am a Java developer for a small consulting firm near Cleveland. Every now and then I scan the help wanted ads just to see what people are looking for, and there were several companies wanting .NET and none for Java. On the other hand, I had no problem finding a Java position (in a couple of weeks no less) when I switched employers a few months ago. I also had companies interviewing me for C# positions though it's definitely weaker on my resume, so maybe that says something about the C# demand around here.
The only people who would dispute the superiority of Visual Studio, C# and ASP.NET would be those who've never spent more than 2 hours in any of them.
.pdb files inexplicably. I'm running a stock system+ClearCase, and IT's applied all available VS updates. This contrasts sharply with emacs, which just plain doesn't crash on me.
.NET), and something totally different under Linux. I've used emacs under Mac OS, Linux, and Windows, and the environment is the same everywhere -- I don't have to throw out knowledge.
.NET. I do a lot of debugging under Linux because I have the excellent valgrind freely available there, whereas VS lacks anything similar out of box (my experiences with Boundschecker involved two weeks of getting it to intermittently work before I finally gave up in frusteration -- I may have to try Purify).
I dunno. I agree that if you don't have conflicting language requirements, C# would be a superior alternative to VB. However, I've found the Visual Studio IDE to be frusteratingly buggy -- I work in my source tree on a remote CIFS share (which is the only possible unusual thing I can think of), and VS 2003 hangs, crashes, and has a tendency to stop being able to modify its
I can only think of a few things that I'd say are really in VS's favor compared to gcc/emacs:
* Intellisense is nicer than emacs's completion system -- it has a lot of language-specific knowledge.
* The source code colorization system in VS is faster. I use lazy font lock under emacs (so colorization happens in the background), but it's still noticeable on large files. I've heard that this is because emacs uses regexes for colorization and VS uses a full parse tree, but I've no idea as to the truth of this.
* I've never used it, but I know a few people who really like the ability to modify running code at the source level.
On the other hand, there are a lot of things that really frusterate me:
* It's sluggish. I use VS locally on my P4, 1GB of RAM machine. I have a P3 Linux box sitting by my desk (used by three people and with only 128MB of RAM). I use both VS on the Windows box and emacs over X11 to the Windows box for editing. VS has these fits where it just sits in "Not Responding" mode for ages, especially when I switch back to VS after working in another window for a while. Emacs doesn't do that.
* It's buggy. I've seen crashes, hangs, and what seems to be problems with file locking of symbol files. This is really frusterating (especially since the symbol file problem manifests itself as silently ignoring breakpoints until the next VS restart).
* VS's editor isn't too great for a serious user. VS has an okay basic code editor, but it has dialog boxes to deal with, makes you use the mouse to get around a fair amount of the time (when I'm developing with screen + gdb + emacs, I never touch the mouse), isn't as easy (for me at least) to automate, and requires you to have multiple instances open to work with multiple solution files. I can use a twin-pane emacs just fine on an eighty-column terminal, but I often feel cramped with the number of panes I have to have open (and can't switch between with the keyboard) in VS on even dual 20" monitors.
* VS isn't portable. If you learn emacs once, you can use it *everywhere*, for every task. I'm currently developing code for WinCE, Win32, and Linux. If you want to use Visual Studio, as best as I can tell, you have to use VS under Win32, VS Embedded under WinCE (which seems to have more resemblance in interface to VS6 than VS
* VS seems to keep losing features (or at least have them segregated into higher-priced products). Profiling was apparently in VS6 (according to our local VS6 guru), but seems to have split off into the Enterprise Edition of VS
* Sometimes VS's debugger slows to a *crawl* and takes quite a while when expanding certain complex data structures. I've no idea what it's internally doing. GDB deals with the same data structures fine.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Ok. I learned OOP in my freshman year too. Then, after graduation and a couple years of experience I realized that I didn't know shit on my freshman year. OOP really is something that takes both experience and theory to be really powerful.
In fact, I'd say the first two years after graduation I was a pretty crappy developer. I didn't know it of course, but later it has really hit me.
Oh, yeah. The other thing that really drives me bonkers about Visual Studio is that it doesn't support C99, which has a hell of a lot of useful features. I mean, Christ, the spec has been out forever and Visual Studio *still* doesn't support it. Gah.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
If you dont believe me go to dice.com or monsterboard.com and look for jobs in your area? java is the #1 sought after language with c++ second and perl or php third.
.net language since programers are just switching to it whether they use the additional webservices or not?
I wonder if they consider c++ a
Also QA jobs is bolony. Most employers tell me its the QA and helpdesk jobs that go to India.
Programming needs to be highly speced and is therefore more efficient where the company headquarters is at for planning. QA doesn't need to be near where the business processes are planned and can be done cheaper oversea's.
I am surprissed any demand is left for programming jobs? Maybe they mean consultants or business process engineering for the phb jobs? Those are needed here.
So the moral of the story is get your degree and get a good business background to suceed. I am back at school after being a formal techie and I learned a ton in my economic classes and now accouting classes that give me a competitive advantage.
http://saveie6.com/
One Lean Manufacturing technique is to use video cameras to capture the manufacturing process. A quality engineer will analyze the tapes to identify areas in the process that create inefficiencies or excess waste, both in terms of materials and workers' time.
This was done fifty years ago. The only difference is the analysts would actually visit the factory floor.
For those here curious about 'the real world', I will say that my personal experience reflects the numbers provided in the article.
.net work at about 50k and have moved up to nearly 100k within 18 months. I have had several jobs in the last year or so, and all of them have offered starting salaries greater than 75k for vb.net and c# work.
.net development. I would consider myself very well qualified though.
.net, as it is such as RAD environment.
.net programmers now that vb.net is a real language. Companies have to work hard to sort out the real developers from the VB Junkies that just picked up .net. One way of doing this is to require c# I suppose.
I'm actually in Oklahoma, which is by no means the Tech Capital of the US. Without a college degree I was able to start
Also, I wouldn't say i'm some expert at
I think perhaps the demand is becuase companies are realizing they can get alot more bang-for-the-buck with
There is a problem though, You have alot of silly VB programmers that think they are
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
That's ridiculous. Are we talking about testing or QA here? QA is prevention, testing is detection. Completely different ball game. I have to agree, in the UK 35,000 is reasonable for a good QA analyst. I know a lot on much more than that.
Yeah, but it's really no different anywhere else:
"Motif is for Unix GUIs!" (later) "Eww - Motif. Let use Qt!"
"Linux Threads!" (next week) "POSIX Threads!"
"Java Enterprise Beans is the right way to do it!" (2 years pass) "Enterprise Beans is the wrong way to do it! Hibernate! JDO!"
etc etc
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
I am a MIS major and focusing on Java right now since its the number 1 language sought after. For someone with limited experience should I be focusing on c#?
I am having flashbacks to 1998 right now with the mcse craze. The ones who had MCSE on their resume got the highest paying jobs. I wonder if the same is going to happen with c#?
After all I will be competing with folks with 10+ years of experience in Java on their resumes when I hit the job market.
http://saveie6.com/
I'm a .NET developer for an instrumentation company. We have a hosted web application that gathers data from our instruments on four continents. We have both a web application and a "smart client" (web service-connected desktop application) for our users to view their data from the hosted database. We also have a bunch of standalone tools. Everything we've started since January 2002 is written in C#, with only a few internal tools written in VB.NET.
.NET. We've had no more than a partial functional outage attributable to any problem in Microsoft software at all (a Windows 2000 OS bug, since patched, caused us to lose data from some monitors for about 12 hours once). It just works.
.NET opportunities here in Portland, Oregon.
The web application has been incredibly reliable. We've never had a minute of downtime that was directly traceable to a defect in
I do get calls from headhunters on a regular basis. There are a lot of
Fewer people learning Microsoft technologies, higher salaries for the ones that are. Bet you Cobol salaries on the raise.
...they're in demand. Because no one has actually ever seen one yet considering that no one is still clear on exactly what .Net really is. ;P
For the humor impaired: The above is a joke. It's funny. Laugh.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
This is, perhaps my number one complaint about open source "zealots." They don't seem to understand that the best way to beat your enemy is to understand your enemy -- and steal his good ideas.
I, too, program on a lot of different platforms and in a lot of different languages. If I hadn't learned about other platforms (Windows included), I wouldn't know half of the handy tricks and tools of the trade that I know today.
--S
-- sigs cause cancer.
As has already been pointed out ad nausem, this is written by folks who don't know programming. Case in point, calling .NET a programming language, when it's a suite of programming languages that target a particular platform.
.NET may be in big demand, but not *every* aspect of .NET is in big demand. If you want those mega-bux salaries, you'd better be prepared to do ASP.NET to pretty much the exclusion of everything else. That's what easily 75% of the .NET oriented jobs I've seen posted are asking for; everyone wants web applications.
That said, there's more they're not saying.
Of course, if you prefer rich client rather than web client application development, like me, you're pretty much stuck.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
I think they stuffed up a couple of things (they mention "CCNE" which I think is really "CCIE") but the general gist is interesting. In NZ it seems that .NET is right up there - but behind java. I really thought that the support fields (sys-admin, desktop technician) might be more in demand - apparently not. however, skilled network administers are REALLY sought after. The main area which recruiters seem to find easy to fill is in the multimedia arena
The other thing that the DoL publish is a monthly job Vacency index which tracks IT vacencies and indexes them against the initial year of monitoring (2003 I think). It has consistently been saying that IT jobs that there are more and more vacencies with each passing month.
I make more than that as a PHP programmer. :)
Of course they're in demand.
They're working for peanuts.
Please, kids, stop accepting crappy salaries. You're undermining the entire salary structure for the rest of us. Hold out. Don't take the first offer. Tell some offerers, in plain scat, to go fuck themselves and their crappy pay scale. If you do that to one employer, and the other guy does that to the other employer, you'll end up filling each others' positions and you'll get more money.
And I'll be able to get work at my usual pay rate (you don't want to know) without having to talk to the CEO about why it's wrong for him to let the salary structure erode. It works, but it's galling to him and to me, and it takes up time I could be billing and accomplishing the mission and making them think engineers are all work and no bullshit. And that will make the negotiating process and the salary structure better for you.
My POV: a new college graduatre who can barely create encapsulated objects is not going to be pulling the same money as a Java turned C# enterprise framework analyst who writes the patterns published in those clever books.
OOP sucks. It has not been proven better. It might be good for writing compilers and device drivers, but not business apps. Interfaces are less stable there and thus thick wrappers get in the way, creating more points that need change per change request.
...and rampant intake of GE food I think I'll give it a miss thanks.
You do realize that the only reason that there's opposition to GE food is because the US biotech industry spent a lot more on developing GE food than anyone else did, and the European agricultural industry spend a great deal of money smearing GE food (out of concern that US biotech would start siphoning off their agricultural industry)?
Opposing GE is simply being a Luddite, because GE is nothing more than a technology. You're hating technology for technology's sake because some marketer wants you to do so. If you've got a problem with something specific, maybe a policy related to GE or some additive to a food, that's reasonable. But simply flat-out disliking GE is silly.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
"Two tech jobs in high demand these days are .NET (dot net) developers and quality assurance analysts..." "...Those who work in software quality management, meanwhile, might make $65,000 to $75,000 a year and be able to negotiate a 10 percent to 15 percent jump in pay if they switch jobs."
I wonder how much a SQA analyst, in a big city (Los Angeles/L.A.), makes these days.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I've been doing technical sifting of CVs for a recruitment agency while I've been recovering from a broken back. One of the positions I've been sifting for is QA team leader for an new development unit of a bit Web retailer. Good QA people are really thin on the ground - most of the people going for this post are not at all well qualified for it, and those who are well qualified and experienced seem to change jobs on average more frequently than once a year.
So if you're a good bug-hunter with team leadership experience, the ability to write a coherent test plan, and familiarity with two or three well known automated test tools and a bug/issue tracker or two, there is gold in them that situations vacant adverts.
Just wish I was systematic enough to be good at bug hunting!
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
I just got hired at a big financial institution for an one year internship between the second and third year of my CompSci degree, not because I had good grades, or because I had good recommendations or theoretical knowleadge, but I believe it was primariliy becuase I can develop in .NET (C# and VB.NET) and have experience in using it in real world situations.
.NET now, ignore and ridicule it at your own expense.
Like it or not, a lot of big companies are using
What school teaches all of the languages you listed?
Here at University of Florida, they teach Java, Java, and more Java. They do dap a bit in C, PHP, and C++ in certain courses, but other than that it's mainly Java. I don't care if they do teach more languages, because it's been my experience that A)if you are an excellent problem solver using one language it can be replicated in others, B) those that want to learn more languages, do.
But please do tell me what you University is teaching. I am quite interested.
You see, after 20+ years in IT, you learn a few things. And let's just say, one day, you'll find yourself unemployed, with your skills being "out-of-date" (I don't care what your degrees are or what your skills are), with some snotty nosed kid telling you that you're stupid. Then, you'll remember some older IT worker telling you that this will happen - I never called anyone stupid, but I did look down on the old timers who were out of work - they were mainframers - ("Mainfremers" is an expression that we used to use for someone who worked on mainframe computers. You'll have to look that one up on your own.) Ya see, I thought that they were where they are because they didn't want to learn anything new. Now I know that it's because they thought, due to mgt BS, media BS, or their own collegues BS, that their skills would be viable forever. Technology has a way of changing in a way that you can't anticipate. If anyone could, they'd be so fucking rich, that they'd own the World.
So, sonny, now that I'm board, you need to realize that you arrogance will get you a quick hit in you pathic ego and nothing else.
Get a grip.
mod as you want: .net is a stupid name.
For the "umpteenth" time, please don't be a wanker. C++ was conceived as "C with Classes" (i.e., an extension of C). Valid C code compiles under C++. There's quite a bit more than just "a relation between the two".
Can I ask a question? For people who believe in Evolution and Darwinism, doesn't Genetically Engineered food fit into natures plan? It just seems like Nature has created a species that can accelerate evolution. It does seem that that might be the only way a CO2 infested hotter planet might be able to sustain 10 billion people anyway.
I always thought the knee jerk hatred of GE foods came from Intellectual property laws.
IE. I plant GE seeds on my farm, they blow onto your farm, now you get sued by the GE company for growing their "patented" crops. Seems like we need IP patent law reform and it seems like things like the Research In Motion patent lawsuit will help the common legislature the need for this reform.
-Nuke the moon
I'd say it jibes with my experience. I am right at the bottom of the pay range they estimate for .NET developers, with 1.5 years' experience (DC area). It's tough right now finding good developers, without even being picky about what technologies they are familiar with.
Also at PDC, there was a presentation about new features being added to the next version of the .Net runtime, to better support dynamic languages. And back to C#, the new 2.0 supports closures, and 3.0 will have type inferencing. Plus there are rumors of some sort of macro facility coming.
" How does this information compare with the Slashdot crowd's real-world experience?"
Well considering most readers of Slashdot are Linux folks, Im willing to bet they say it isntr so
Right now, almost every Fortune 500 company which sends out bills to consumers has one thing in common:
.NET, Java, or whatever other language and platform you could choose would be immense. Which is to say, it's all going absolutely nowhere, even if they have to hire liberal arts people, train them, and set them to the task. Business people don't pay for expensive rework, because they have to demonstrate business value derived from large expenses.
A large IBM mainframe architecture running a plethora of night-batch COBOL apps, mostly written by baby boomers who are looking longingly at retirement RIGHT NOW.
The cost to recreate these applications in
Therefore, competent coders who understand the following terms and can work within the environment they imply will be in huge demand in about 5 years: COBOL, JCL, DB2, VSAM, CICS, CA7.
You wanna work in mission-critical code? Like the idea of 5-9s uptime? Start with z/OS.
As a sophmore in college, I just went to a career fair for computer science majors. Among all the companies I talked to, only one of them was hiring .NET programmers, and they only wanted one. Everyone else was going for Java & C++. One of the guys didn't even know what .NET was, but it's management; what do you expect?
Then again, this career fair was for students at my university, and our computer science department is based on Java, so that might make a difference.
I personally hope that .NET does get bigger. Even though it was made by M$, C# is simply wondeful.
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
What this article really means is that IT workers are avoiding .NET as if it were anthrax powder. Which is a good thing. Perhaps they remember what happened to the last Microsoft framework, VB6: it disappeared overnight, and along with it took ASP and VBScript. 3 million programmers became legacy software developers overnight. The best that can be said is that, at least M$ didn't put them into showers and turn on the gas.
And the new ASP.NET 2.0 obsolescese the previous ASP.NET 1.0/1.1 code, changes the object hierarchy and deprecates many of the old and most-used controls. So the end result is that everyone who has written ASP.NET 1.0/1.1 code will eventually have to rewrite their applications to ASP.NET 2.0 or above. New developers will have no interest in supporting 1.0/1.1 legacy software. And this will happen again and again with each significant release level of the framework.
Sorry but I don't want to rewrite my apps every 6 months just because M$ wants to catch up with me. I'll stick with other FOSS frameworks.
Bodyguard at Google.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The list of my company's clients and the projects we've done for them. Need I say more?
Actually, the safe career choice is becoming a HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) technician. That's what people in Silicon Valley are studying to get out of the offshoring rat race. Every building has an HVAC system, and they all need some attention now and then. The job can't be offshored; you have to go mess with the equipment on site.
Wow, it sounds like you guys in the US get at least half the legally-guaranteed minimum leave here in the UK (leaving aside the fact that most employers over here will pay professional staff on sick days or set up insurance policies to do so for them, and won't count public holidays as part of the leave allowance). And by European standards generally, our employers are fairly stingy; several other Euro nations have more public holidays and/or higher average leave allowances.
What you call "hard work" I call "putting up with being overworked". It's pretty well established that working long hours and getting little leave don't actually increase your real productivity, other than in very short bursts. Averaged over the long term, a typical knowledge worker gets dramatically diminishing returns beyond about 45 hours per week, starts going backwards around the 60 hour mark, and is actually negatively productive by about 80 hours. Similarly, those who work for several months without any signficant period of time off start to lose effectiveness, and ultimately to become counterproductive.
Good management has known this and taken advantage of it for a long time. This is one reason why smaller companies with more enlightened policies kick the average corporate ass when it comes to productivity. (Various other management incompetencies, typically related to poor procedures that get in the way rather than helping, explain much of the rest, but this is one of the biggies.)
The scariest thing is the mindset I see in so many US workers, that the work culture over there is actually normal and not so bad. I'm sure a lot of people there genuinely feel that way, but that doesn't mean they're right.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Not here in the South Florida market. Still C++/Java. Our internal C# project sucks/failing because of speed and complexity. Twice as slow as Java. Three times slower than C/C++. CNN might be wrong here.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
History suggests otherwise. Why is this time different?
Sure, and a couple of years ago there was a universal directive that managed code should be used for everything unless there was a very good reason not to... which was revoked a few months later. To date, pretty much everything that Microsoft really relies on does not depend on .Net for anything essential.
Did you read that here?
So was the last guy. And the one before him.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
There's nothing wrong with Perl. Or Python, Ruby, Lisp, C#, Java or any other language. Each has its place and purpose. But you are arguing the wrong thing. This is about whether or not Perl provides an acceptable platform for large-scale distributed software devleopment. Not if it runs your favorite forum website. But you see someone making the point that [ThingX] is not perfect for [PurposeY] and you have to fly off the handle and become the Open Source Freedom Fighter, deftly throwing "M$" and "Windoze" projectiles left and right to prop up your hilariously weak "arguments", if one can call them that. What a spectacle.
Trolling? Nah, this is trolling.
Tell you what - leave the evangelizing to those of us who know what we're talking about. It's painful to see people like you making fools out of themselves - and by extension, out of the community. Just do something else.
I've been searching for QA people and .NET programmers. Super hard to find. Let me clarify something for people who might misunderstand the need to have someone who can work in .NET - it doesn't mean that's the best programming environment out there. Clients make choices, if we want to have them as clients, we have to work with what they've got, especially if we can't convince them to use something else.
I have found that the automatic code generation in VS 2005 allows me to spend more time on security and correct by design (not correct by testing).
It's uniformed youngsters like you that keep old Java farts like me in business:) By the time you've code generated an untested, pseudo-designed pile of crap built with layer of layer of bad decisions that you don't have the test coverage to refactor in confidence, I'll get to come along and replace the whole thing with TDD matched to the object domain you could neither devine from scratch (and nobody can) or evolve with a good foundation. I'll get the pleasure of throwing out the M$ trash, putting my Nth CruiseControll/CVS(Subversion)/Eclipse build environment, and demonstrating lower project defects. FP Brooks used to like to say, "Make one version to throw away. You will anyhow". While unit test coverage lets you get away with NOT doing that these days, it's a great old saw to pull out as an excuse to nuke Microsoft garbageware from orbit:)
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
I have a distant relative who occasionally does support for a company that has an old FreeBSD server. He was excited to learn that I'd be able to fix it, because he's only used Windows. It was misconfigured, causing it to break many years later when their dhcp server gave it a new IP address. If if BSD died, BSD servers will be around for many more years.
.NET is that they require runtimes which are not installed by default on Windows or most other operating systems, and both runtimes have strict redistribution restrictions, so they're not the platforms of choice for developers who like to write standalone applications that can be installed by ordinary consumers, but they're fine for business software. Microsoft is smothering its baby here. Additionally, .NET has nothing to offer for those wanting to write cross platform software, while Java does. Vista might fix the distribution part of the problem, but Microsoft has no desire to assist cross platform open source implementations of .NET, and threatens them with several of their .NET related patents.
The big problem with Java and
Application developers want the ease of VB, the speed and power of C++, the cross platformness of Java, and the ability to produce standalone executables, free of large dependencies that that aren't preinstalled on most systems. I'n not much of a pascal programmer anymore, but Delphi/Kylix would rule the world (of rapid standalone consumer application development) if it wasn't so expensive and proprietary, and if Kylix wasn't abandoned. Maybe there's still a chance if the Lazarus project matures to production-ready.
The whole dead end technology thing is a bit of a non-argument though. There's nothing wrong with learning a new language or platform every five years, and nothing preventing the maintenance of legacy systems written with older technologies. There are a lot of complex, expensive ERP systems that still use COBOL, and are still finding new users.
So, while this article says that demand is high for "Developers who are expert users of Microsoft's software programming language .NET...". You should focus on the key-word here, "expert". I think what they are infering here are people who know the ins-and-outs of the framework and the language, the software engineering process.
.Net developers. But the pool is so limited. Most candidates we interview come from non-enterprise groups. Their knowledge of the framework (or any framework) is limited. And they lack sound software engineering experience.
.Net positions, and in all cases they have transitioned well and exceeded expectations.
.Net developers which is being met by java developers.
We have high demand for "expert"
We do find plenty of Java developers with enterprise experience and from rich software engineering experience. We've hired Java developers for
So, for my company at least, we have high demand for "expert"
My company's experience might be unique considering we are in NYC, and many of the Java folks we interview are from large financials.
I agree, but as someone who's been working as a .Net programmer in my daytime job for the last 5 months, I'm not convinced that a good understanding of computer science is beneficial to getting a job, unless you're lucky enough to find someone who understands what they're hiring for.
During my last two job searches, most recruitment agents struck me as being ignorant when it came to understanding what they were hiring for. If an employer had asked them to find a driver for their bright blue truck and the recruitment agents were acting with the same level of skill and understanding, they would have put forward all the people they could find with blue bicycles. Any people looking for work who only had experience driving trucks that weren't blue would have been turned away as not worth putting forward as an applicant.
After these experiences, I don't find it very surprising that certain recruitment companies are reporting to CNN that they're having trouble finding .Net programmers. As far as I'm concerned, a recruitment agency that claims this probably isn't very good at looking for good .Net programmers. In the end, I got my job through a friend. I was put through a 2 day crash course about .Net API's, it's going nicely, and I feel fortunate that the seem to be considering me as quite valuable to have around.
Eclipse rocks. I use it for all my PHP, Ruby, Perl, and Java work.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
I have 3 years experience on VB.NET & ASP.NET and 4 prior years experience in VB5/6 and classic ASP. I make $75K/yea + 5% (of my gross) 401(k) matching + a sizable bonus every year (last year it was $5K). My resume is listed on Monster, Dice, and Career builder. Though I list Linux and FreeBSD experience, I've yet to get a call for a Linux or FreeBSD job. I get at least 2 calls weekly from headhunters for .NET jobs.
/. loves to hate Microsoft, you can't argue that having experience in Microsoft technologies (again, regardless of how you feel about those technologies) makes you more marketable.
Regardless of how much everyone at
Could I get a PHP+MySQL job or an SQP job? Certainly. Are those technologies so popular that headhunters salivate when they see my resume? Not a chance.
Prevent linux based DDOS's!
http://linux.denialofservice.org/
Actually i don't know guys, i used elipse a couple of times to teaching my labs, and it wasn't very good. Yes, vs is a lot of drag and drop, yes it has a lot of stupid features that beginners doesn't need, but man it is useful when you need it. I think this relates to the gimp vs. photoshop argument, the accessibility is a problem for elipse
No... I *am* the guy who knows about .NET live and in person. I don't just idly speculate on Slashdot; I do this stuff for a living. Fact: .NET was stillborn. It offers absolutely nothing that isn't available from other technologies at a lower price and with less lock-in. So yes, do not question my authoritaaaaa.
OK chief ;-) Your first post: .NET, and he's not a fan of it. I don't intend to waste my time learning it, because it's dead-end technology for a dying platform.
.NET live and in person. I don't just idly speculate on Slashdot; I do this stuff for a living.
.NET......I don't just idly speculate on Slashdot".
;-)
Only one guy in the shop knows anything about
Your next post:
No... I *am* the guy who knows about
So you begin by refering to yourself I guess in the 3rd person since "he's not a fan of it" is actually refering to yourself. Hey whatever floats your boat, haven't lost all creditbility yet. However, then you go into this little beauty: "I don't intend to waste my time learning it...... I *am* the guy who knows about
OK, so you refuse to learn it but you already know it ummm, ya know that thing I said about creditiblity a bit ago.... forget it. Its gone
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
A few have some idea of client needs, and actually spend time talking to them about it. Most just get an email of requirements, put it out and keyword match.
I've had agencies tell me that I couldn't be put forward for a contract because I had a skill with currentversion-1, where the differences between currentversion and currentversion-1 were almost indistinguishable AND that you know the company are unlikely to be using any features that were added since currentversion-3.