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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?"
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??
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
What pays is not the proficiency but the willingness to do the job. .NET programming is "unsexy" integration work in an environment where you buy most of the code and have to cooperate with many, often competing, entities.
Interesting, this past week there was another article about the potential for elimination of QA staff due to agile programming techniques:
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.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
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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.
Look, I don't normally bother posting here, but either a person is a coder or they're not; honestly, if you can't pick up any of those technologies and run with them after a few days familiarising yourself then you're not a coder.
".NET/C# is a language for programmers who are at least mediocre. ... 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"
.NET jobs out there.
For work, you go where the money is. For personal gratification, you program with whatever you want.
I've been programming in C++ for over 14 years on both Windoze and Unix, non-stop... and I'd consider myself a C++ expert (if there is such a thing).
When C#/.NET was in Beta 1, I started learning that and programmed in Java as well. It never hurts to learn multiple languages... gives you flexibility in the market place.
C++ is still my favorite language, but I'm not giving up $100K+ per year just because of my religious affiliation with the church of C++.
Are there C++ jobs out there that pay $100K+? Yes. But the reality is that there are more
C# really, is pretty decent, at least v2.0. I don't believe the generics are as expressive as C++ templates, but they're a welcomed addition from v1.x.
I've used both more than 10 hours and there are as good if not better IDEs out there. Eclipse alone comes with better out of the box refactoring support that VS 2005. Yeah it's a memory hog, but not much worse than VS... Let's not even get into the limited options for SCM... VS also won't let me go back and forth between a Java project and a Python project. What is comes down to is the intellisense and project templates for VS. Ho Hum.... It's light years beyond maybe anything MS has done before..
I was a project manager on .net project this last fall. Typically I do Java middle tier programming in eclipse. Let me just say, after having spent more than 2 hours with Visual Studio both on this project as well as others, I would take eclipse any day of the week. Visual Studio does some things for you. It helps with web services - making them simpler to develop from start to finish for example. However, we spent gobs and gobs of time making sure that everyone's Visual Studio environments were synched up correctly so that the code would compile. Often Visual Studio assumed locations of where to put compiled code or dependencies which turned out to be wrong quite a few times.
I'm all for advanced IDEs that save time, but often it seemed like Visual Studio was taking more time to maintain than the time it saved in code completion, coloring, integration with IIS, etc. I think it has been a model for other IDEs to follow, but frankly I think eclipse has solved the major deficiencies of Visual Studio.
Eclipse does have its own problems, but it is much more reliable than Visual Studio in my experience.
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.
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. "
Someone who has coded in VB.Net for years would be a far better choice for a Managed C++.Net project than someone who has programmed in C++ on another platform for years.
.Net is so platform specific that most of what you learn is non-portable.
Does anyone else see the problem with this?
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.
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.
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Compared to what?? I'm a 5 year veteran of server-side and client Java development, I recently built an app in C#/.NET mainly to see how it is. Some thought:
.NET as a platform is very immature, which is to be expected - Java wasn't so great in the early days. The collections framework is really lacking - no Sets? That's just an example. Windows Forms is decent, no surprise there, it's really the platforms major selling point. Certainly for building Windows GUI apps Forms is a big step up from Swing.
Visual Studio sucks. Really. I can only believe that everyone who loves it so much has never used a decent IDE before. Where's the refactoring? Where's the analysis? Where's the (working) real time error highlighting? Where's the customization (what if I don't want double-click to open the fricking GUI editor every time)? I could go on. Installing Resharper (from the same guys who do IntelliJ - a REALLY good IDE) improved things a lot, but it's still a mess.
C# as a language is, well, meh. It's alright. Doesn't do anything (important) that Java doesn't and screws up a few things quite royally. Structs are worse than useless, they're dangerous. Value and reference types are impossible to distinguish, again for no really good reason. I like the delegate stuff, event handling is neat, and the Property syntax is a bit neater than get/set. But where's the new cool stuff? Just not there.
So my overall experience has been pretty much what I expected - it's a Java wannabe that has some potential but needs some work. We'll see how things pan out.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
i really don't understand your argument at all. You argue that objects shouldn't be objects at all, but rather static functions in an object namespace? Why even bother then? Why not just write C?
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