.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?"

Comments

Qué?

[Mathiasdm]

Nothing for you to see here, please move along

It must be because I can only program Java. *sigh*

I'm Job Searching

[B_un1t]

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??

Re:I'm Job Searching

[Timesprout]

I believe most educational centers use Java as their demonstration language these days

Re:I'm Job Searching

[CastrTroy]

You should just buy a book and learn it yourself. Do some real projects that you can demonstrate to the interviewers if you don't have any real world experience. You can use Mono if you want, or use the VS.Net Express Edition to get started. Once you get into more complex stuff, it'll probably be better for you to get real experience with the real VS.Net IDE. It's a pretty powerful IDE, and I like it a lot. There's a few things I'd like to change, but otherwise it's pretty good.

Re:I'm Job Searching

[$1uck]

Download the Express editions of visual XXX.NET and then go watch the streaming multi-media lessons. http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vwd/lear ning/default.aspx If you've done any real programming it seems fairly straight forward and the express software is similiar enough to the real stuff. The beginning lessons do a fairly decent job of showing you how to use the IDE which I think is probably just as tricky (if not trickier) than learning a new syntax.

Re:I'm Job Searching

[ACNSlave]

I would be ashamed to be a *dot* net programmer. Use Debian or similiar distro, and you can get programmers from all over the world.

Meh. Shame has nothing to do with it. Feeding 3 kids, paying down a mortgage and putting gas in my Saturns has much more influence over me than your philosophical bullcrap. Shame... What Ever.

Final analysis: code is code is code. If coding for OSS projects floats your boat, then do so, Its a free world. I use Debian too, just not @ work.

BN, MCAD .NET (C# corporate whore)

Cheers, my man

Re:I'm Job Searching

[Anonymous Coward]

This is actually a crap shot. If you are just starting, do not lock yourself into one thing or another. Keep in mind that there are plenty of MS coders out, many who are currently unemployed (with more coming). In addition, if you read the article, it is for EXPERT .net coders (i.e. with 5 years experience). What was missed is that experienced *nix coders typically make 100K and above (also with 5 years experience or more).
 
While you should learn this, you should also be gaining experience in java/C/C++, php, ruby, maybe some cobol and VB, and on several platforms particularly, Windows, *nix (apple and linux are the most used *nix, but solaris is big in some companies and you can also download for free).
 
Personally, I woudl try to judge the market and ask what will be hot in about a year, not what is hot NOW!. Then shoot for that market. For me, back in the mid 80's, I did trs-80 in a lab as well as mainframe/dos/apple, then in late 80's, I started down the path of network coding on Unix, moved on perl/web development in the early 90's (with the real jobs of working at IBM Watson(OS2/AIX), HP(HP-UX), Bell labs(Windows/SunOS) and USWest (mainframe, apple, HP)), started Linux coding in 93 with jobs in 94 through 97, teaching for the next few years (working on start-ups doing wifi), now contracting to move stuff from WIndows to Linux (lots of calls for that).
 
Make the right call, and you have plenty of work. Make the wrong call, and you are unemployable.

Re:I'm Job Searching

[GiantCranes]

There are many great resources available for you. Grab yourself a copy of Visual Web Developer Express: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vwd/defa ult.aspx. This will allow you to mess around with the .NET framework and get a feel for the IDE - it is very similar to Visual Studio 2005. You will find lots of help on the forums at http://www.asp.net/ and this is a good starting point. The quickstart tutorials are great if you would like to wet your beak : http://www.asp.net/QUICKSTART/aspnet/Default.aspx.

Re:I'm Job Searching

[nick-less]

But Pascal isn't really used anymore, is it? What ever happened to that great language?

It became Delphi...

Re:I'm Job Searching

[Anonymous Coward]

Delphi uses Object Pascal, if you started with Pascal the transition is easy.
Another thing to keep an eye on is Lazarus (www.lazarus.freepascal.org)
Basically it is an open source and multi-platform Delphi look-alike
now at release 0.9.10 and improving steadily.
Lazarus uses Freepascal 2.X as compiler and LCL (sort of a multiplatform VCL) as GUI toolkit.
Lazarus runs on Windows, Linux and Mac, the Freepascal compiler supports x86, x86-64, ARM, Sparc, PowerPC and MC68000.
IMHO Lazarus+Freepascal are already perfect for learning programming and are very near to become good enough as a multiplatform Delphi alternative for serious development.

Re:I'm Job Searching

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

This is probably a bit O/T, but since it seems people are interested enough to reply/mod up in this subthread...

I believe most educational centers use Java as their demonstration language these days

That was the trend a few years ago, but I get the feeling it's been reversing for a while now. Java is a decent tool for plenty of jobs, but teaching really isn't one of them, and never was. There's just too much overhead and irrelevant detail before you get to the core concepts, and then part of the point of Java is that it's very limiting in what you can do in some key areas. For example, you can't teach a comprehensive understanding of OO when the assumption is that all classes share a common root and there's little consideration for multiple inheritance and mix-ins. You can argue that Java is a better language without those things, but how can you explain that to someone who doesn't know what they are?

I suspect the same is true of using any .Net language as your first. You're better off learning underlying programming techniques using something simple -- try Python for procedural, Smalltalk to understand objects, ML to learn functional programming, C to learn low-level stuff and basic data structures, etc. Then there are only a fairly small number of somewhat unique features in .Net languages, which you can pick up fairly quickly if you understand the basic ideas: delegates aren't particularly challenging to anyone who's done a bit of functional programming or even worked with function pointers, for example, though they might seem a bit strange to people who haven't experienced either. The rest is just a class library, and you learn it on demand, just as you would with Java's, or with CPAN, or whatever.

Re:I'm Job Searching

[mario_grgic]

VS.NET is not such a great IDE after all. It's actually mediocre compared to offerings available for Java.

What if you are working on a project with 30,000 source files. There is no way to tell the IDE open file "FooBar.sc". Code exploration and navigation is not well supported (the source view at the bottom is copied from Eclipse, but has limited usefulness and it's a lot slower than corresponding view in Eclipse).

Now Eclipse is a great IDE. With a click of a button each line of java code becomes a link (as in web page link). You can navigate and explore and learn 100,000,000 line code base much faster with it. It has favourites/forward/back buttons etc.

You can open any type using Camel case or wild cards, so you never have to memorize what project/package/folder the file you want to work on is in, etc.

Re-factoring support is much better than VS.NET 2005 etc.

All in all, light years ahead of anything we have seen from MS so far.

Re:I'm Job Searching

[lip_spork]

.NET is not the skill you need to "break into IT". Nor is any other platform or language.

It's my personal opinion is that the mentality a successful programming career requires is something you almost have to be born with. You need to not only excel at solving complex problems on your own, but must enjoy it. There are plenty of very smart people (smarter than me) who can't put together a simple app - they just don't have the patience.

You're reading slashdot - that's a good sign. But I'd be suspicious of someone trying to enter the field who hadn't picked up some skills on their own, as a hobby. I bought my first computer in 8th grade (1983) and spent much of my high school years making games on it. I wrote an adventure game on my HP calculator. This may sound ridiculous but I'll bet a lot of people reading this have similar stories. Most of the programmers I know are basically introverted - not in any extreme way, they just function well on their own. Someone with a very outgoing personality, a "people person", would probably do better in another field. For someone who's intelligent and ambitious, there are plenty of jobs that pay better than programmer.

That said, if you're confident that you should be a programmer, I'd say learning .NET on your own with books and tutorials would be a good first step. If it doesn't hold your interest then it probably wasn't meant to be.

Unless you have a CS degree, your .NET noodling alone is not likely to land you a job. Fortunately for you there is a really low barrier to entry into the programming profession. I'll tell you what's worked for me and other people I know. Hire on to a small to medium sized company (if you're not in one already) with an IT infrastructure, but not a mature software development division. Start in whatever menial position you can qualify for, but let your abilities and interests be known to the IT group. Then look for opportunities - processes that you could help automate using MS Access, scripting, or whatever they have on hand. If you do well I guarantee you there will be no lack of projects coming your way, and in a couple of years you'll have some good resume fodder. This approach will gain you valuable industry insight and business analysis skills as well - something that university taught developers often lack. Hopefully your novice code and ill-conceived projects won't have too much damage before you can join a real development team, and learn about the software development lifecycle.

Good Luck

Re:I'm Job Searching

[CastrTroy]

VS.Net lets you do that, You see a function you want to explore, push F12, you go right to the definition. Then you got forward and backward buttons to go back and forth to where you've been in the code. Oh, and you can mark places like a favourites list. Can't recall what they call the specific feature, but it puts a blue arrow beside the line, and it shows up in your task list. Just because you aren't aware of how to do things in VS.Net, doesn't mean it doesn't do them. And this is only in VS.Net 2002, I'm sure things have improved in the new 2005 version.

They don't know what .NET is

[adderofaspyre]

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.

Re:They don't know what .NET is

[roesti]

Don't worry, even Microsoft doesn't know what .NET is yet.

Re:They don't know what .NET is

[the eric conspiracy]

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.

Does anyone else see the problem with this? .Net is so platform specific that most of what you learn is non-portable.

Re:They don't know what .NET is

[Randolpho]

Does anyone else see the problem with this? .Net is so platform specific that most of what you learn is non-portable.

Nothing learned while programming is non-portable. The basic concepts of programming, as well as everything built on those concpts, are the same in any language.

I'd say thats about right

[kafka47]

If anything, many of the .NET and other programming jobs that I see coming across my desk are in the range of 85-100K (in Canada). And there are a lot of them.

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.

/K

Re:I'd say thats about right

[heinousjay]

Yeah, get angry. That anger will get you... well, nothing at all. But I bet it feels good, at first.

Re:I'd say thats about right

[GlassHeart]

This is good for QA folk who eventually want to migrate into development, as they'll gain valuable skills along the way.

The ideal QA person is one who actually enjoys breaking stuff, and will hone his or her skills at it for years to come. One who already wants to migrate to development can have the wrong frame of mind (as to what their job should be), as well as conflicts of interest (don't piss off the development manager). I say this as a developer who has great respect for good, professional QA people.

What is a .Net Developer?

[Sub Zero 992]

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.

Re:What is a .Net Developer?

[man_of_mr_e]

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?

Large groups of employers

[eneville]

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.

Re:Large groups of employers

[Erik Hensema]

Because .NET is the major development platform of the major operating system.

Neither perl nor python are very popular for large application development, even on unix. So there isn't much demand.

Re:Large groups of employers

[OverlordQ]

Neither perl nor python are very popular for large application development, even on unix. So there isn't much demand.

Bah, that's because we already solved all the problems ;)

Re:Large groups of employers

[dc29A]

Never underestimate the stupidity of large groups (the employers) of people

So a company, who has it's infrastructure on Windows, should use a development environment not designed for it? Or worse, scrap Windows and install Linux? You know in a utopic world this would be a good thing to do. But not all companies are filthy rich that can afford the costs migration to the "cool *nix tech du jour". Some companies, especially the small and medium ones that are strapped for cash can't afford migration that means: training people, replacing most software and whatnot.

I hate Microsoft like the next guy, but .NET, especially the 2.0 framework is nice. The IDEs are finally catching up with the likes of Eclipse and Slick Edit (although Slick Edit still owns all), The code generated is fast and you can develop very fast on it.

Need a http server? About 10 lines of code of C#.
Need a windows service? About 6 lines of code C#.

Don't bash .NET just because you don't like Microsoft. C# and .NET are a good platform to develop on, especially in the Windows monoculture.

Re:Large groups of employers

[lilnobody]

Why isn't something that's more portable (perl/python) in such demand? Really bakes my noodle.

Ever try and write an enterprise level application, even a web application, in perl? It's great for small internal applications; that CPAN doo-hickey works just great.

But CPAN bites you back when you hit the limits of what those modules can do in a large-scale application. When you hit the limit of what is the easiest and arguably the best (and arguably not) ORM out there, Class::DBI, there's 150 different, incompatible modules out there to do what you want. Which one will be maintained? Which one silently overwrites methods deep within more established modules and doesn't tell you? Want one that adds support for limit and sort by? One module gives you that easily, but not with the same interface as the other 10 that are more full featured. Which do you choose?

Don't even get me started on trying to send an email with Perl. CPAN seems to have a new module for sending email every other day. It's become less of a one-stop shop for the modules you need and more of the perl newbie ftp drop site for modules no one could possibly need or want.

As an example, check out what's been uploaded today. Version 0.02 of JavaScript::MochiKit, helpfully described as 'makes perl suck less', with 15 classes and less than a page of documentation. Great! Just what I was looking for!

There's also a module for interacting with MySpace, two versions in the same day of of an XML parser (writer? who knows, I didn't read it) for a data format used by the library of congress (from the same proud author of version 0.3 of Acme::Voodoo, described as 'Do bad stuff to your objects'), version 0.18 (version 0.17 was yesterday's) of DBIX::Class::Loader, a copycat of Class::DBI::Loader for this self-proclaimed CDBI replacement (which is probably needed, but god help a perl newbie who shows up on CPAN looking for ORM nowadays). It's 2pm my time (Austria), meaning it's 5:30 central time, and there are already 9 modules with version numbers less than 1.0 uploaded to CPAN.

Now don't get me wrong, this is fantastic for a small scale app. I'm sure someone will get some use out of a MySpace profile accessor in perl. But what makes CPAN, and perl, great for small-time stuff makes it just terrible for enterprise applications.

As for perl's portability...do you really expect to make an argument that a language that is, in quite official terms, defined by the official compiler is portable? Perl runs on windows, but since perl.exe IS the language, differences between it and the unix versions aren't even technically bugs...they just ARE! It's not a proper way to 'run a language', so to speak.

I've been programming in perl for years. I get paid well for it. I don't plan to stop using it for my insignificant applications. But I know damn well why it's not in demand.

nobody

Re:Large groups of employers

[NutscrapeSucks]

Hint: Trying to judge the software development market based on your Debian installation is futile.

Perl -- Had a shot at commercial app dev relevance in the 90s, but the world passed it by, and is used rarely for new projects. Largely relegated to Unix system scripts, which is more of what it was designed for.

Python -- Just because some college student coded a filesharing app with it doesn't make it a popular language. Nothing against the language, just that you probably won't find a job using it.

IIS -- it's actually a very popular web application server, but very few of those installations would show up in Netcraft surveys because they aren't Internet-accessible. Judging by the job market it's much more likely you will be "working" (that is, getting paid) on IIS or even Tomcat rather than Apache httpd.

Re:Large groups of employers

[Decaff]

Hint: Trying to judge the software development market based on your Debian installation is futile.

Heh. This sums up so much about posts on development languages on Slashdot.

Re:Large groups of employers

[nobodysbusiness]

Neither perl nor python are very popular for large application development, even on unix. So there isn't much demand.

This may be changing. I've been interviewing with two companies recently, and they both either use, or plan to use Python for a major application. On one hand, the first company sells a Windows Server 2003 box with MS SQL 2005 and Python for the backend to their app. The client software? C# and .NET. The second company is selling a server running Fedora Core 4 and PostgreSQL, with C++ as the main language. However, they have began to recognize productivity problems, and are therefore planning to wrap their C++ core in Python or some other Very High Level Language (VHLL). Get used to it folks. In the future, most software will be written in a VHLL, with a few performance critical sections ported to something like C++ or C#. Sound familiar? Thats what people used to use assembly for. PS: First post

Re:Large groups of employers

[Anonymous Coward]

I have worked on large scale Perl applications. The key ingredient is intelligent programmers. Sadly many companies do not realize that spending 150K per person on two programmers is more efficient than spending 85k per person on 10. Companies would rather have lots of monkeys than a few geniuses. Syntactically restrictive languages are popular because of this. ORM mapping modules are more necessary in languages that enforce OO programming. I would rather be able to use more powerful techniques when appropriate. And I would rather work on a large Perl project built by a few smart people than a large java/.net project built by a tide of idiots.

Re:Large groups of employers

[pooh666]

Wish I had mod points for you. There is always a clue to such posts as your parent, things like, complaining about sending emails. So Net::SMTP was really hard to find? You have to know the modules and tools people write in Perl just like with anything else. But with Perl it is quite easy to fix the damn thing yourself. Recently we were building a home spun(for very good reason) webmail app. The use of Email::StripMIME save massive amounts of time and worked very well. When we found a bug, we worked around it and sent an email to the author. We are now handling hundreds of mail accounts with hundreds of thousdands of emails and doing quite well. The sad part is that not many people seem to understand what you and I do about Perl. But a few do, one great example of a LARGE app that I know of is Bricolage.. Which is getting cooler all of the time, now support PHP templates.

Re:Large groups of employers

[lilnobody]

Ahh, a common confusion. You have confused respect for the language with respect for the needs of a long-term, well-designed system. I'm responding to two posts at once here, which I think is fair since one wishes he had mod points for the first, so please bear with me.

The key ingredient is intelligent programmers. Sadly many companies do not realize that spending 150K per person on two programmers is more efficient than spending 85k per person on 10.

This is exactly why .NET is in demand and perl is not--the focus of the story. Note I never said I was going to stop using perl. Putting aside the problems of finding those two people to design an application, you then have to tell a client that 50% of your design team can be hit by a bus tomorrow, and it's just not what people want to hear. Enterprise projects are not about efficiency of development. Enterprise projects have completely different goals, and that's what most perl programmers fail to understand.

And I would rather work on a large Perl project built by a few smart people than a large java/.net project built by a tide of idiots.

This attitude is exactly why the perl culture is not going mainstream. This is the attitude of someone who refuses to work with a team that hasn't forced him to respect them. This is how primadonnas think, and not the way the people who have those .NET programming jobs at good salaries want programmers to think.

There is always a clue to such posts as your parent, things like, complaining about sending emails. So Net::SMTP was really hard to find? You have to know the modules and tools people write in Perl just like with anything else.

This misses the point of my original post. I never said I couldn't find a tool to send an email. I said that CPAN is a clearinghouse for unfinished, in development, and first-time libraries. Net::SMTP does in fact work rather well. I've used it. But, say I were showing up to CPAN the first time. A search for 'Send Email' (most people are thinking about emails, not SMTP), brings me to Email::Send, Email::Send::Sendmail, Email::Send::NNTP (this doesn't make much sense), Email::Send::Qmail, Log::Dispatch::Email, Test::Nightly::Email, Mail::Spool, Mail::Sender, Mail::Sendmail, Mail::Send, Mail::SendEasy, and there are even more. This is ridiculous; it would be impossible to make a business justification for choosing one over the other.

Compare this to the MFC, which, while not NEARLY as extensive as CPAN, is MUCH better documented, is standardized, and it's a safe bet.

When we found a bug, we worked around it and sent an email to the author.

Why not just use the MFC and write your own, if you have to pay attention to the guts of the library code? A business wants to be able to say: we can be SURE of our library code, and we wrote everything else ourselves.

I'm not trying to say it's better or worse, the whole perl culture thing. It can be quite good, actually, and I think other language communities should take a hint from perl in some areas, especially some of those libraries which arose out of the system I am so quick to disparage. There should be something as good as DateManip in every standard library, and Date::Simple lets one use dates almost as easily as a primitive, which makes life SO much goddamn easier, to be frank. I understand that perl has definite advantages.

But that is just not what a business is looking for. Both of the parent posts to this smack to me of elitism. That perl is better than some other language for some reason. It's not the language. It's the culture surrounding it. It is, no offense, people like yall who think that management is stupid for going with the trend. Software is a means to an and, and not a means unto itself. The tools for creating a tool, by and large, should not be out of the ordinary.

nobody

Re:Large groups of employers

[typical]

...and we wrote everything else ourselves.

A sure sign of quality. :-)

Re:Large groups of employers

[Prof.Phreak]

Neither perl nor python are very popular for large application development, even on unix. So there isn't much demand.

Are you kidding?

Besides for Microsoft shops (relatively new development), most of the industry (any company with IT department older than 20 years) uses UNIX (and a fair bit of Perl/shell/C) for their core business. I'm not talking about employee computers (all those are Windwos), but servers, databases, etc., stuff that folks actually maintain/write code for.

When I hear of a corp using MS SQL Server and MS software for everything, that basically tells me that they've only been using IT in their business for the last 5-7 years. (again, I'm not talking about employee computers).

Re:Kill me...kill me please.

[Musteval]

There's a shortage of blind monkeys missing three fingers that want to learn these languages.

Anyway, just because it's easy to learn doesn't necessarily mean that it's a bad programming language. It just means that it's an easy to learn one.

the 'dot net' language?

[mikeburke]

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.

Yes! They're Right!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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 .NET.

Re:Yes! They're Right!

[NutscrapeSucks]

Care to explain how a "bondage and discipline" language like C# is easier to learn and more tolerant of bad programming practices, than TMTOWTDI open source languages like PHP and Perl? Oh, that's right, you were just spreading FUD.

For years, one could blame Microsoft for cheap amateur hack coding. No more -- Open Source "LAMP" now totally owns that market.

Re:Yes! They're Right!

[Billly Gates]

Most seem to require java and its still #1 by far in any job search.

So I wonder about this claim?

Its stupid to me as a good programmer is proficient in programming and not a language. Maybe the HR weenies think 10+ years in java programming dont count as webservice programming experience in c#.net, so they want all the newbies out of college with no experience. Idiots.

But the spike may not reflect the large situation because not everyone has experience with.net because its new and HR folks filter qualified applicants whose language skills dont match.

Wow, wish I made that much...

[Traf-O-Data-Hater]

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.

Re:Wow, wish I made that much...

[jallen02]

I get three weeks of vacation. Most folks do. God-Bothering.. bothers me too. GE food? Ehh.. we ship that stuff all over the world. Its hard to know exactly where your food came from.
 
The shootings... I am not exactly sure what you mean by this. People do get shot yes.. but it is not like we all run around in fear of being shot. Statistically it is one of the least likely ways for you to die. Heart disease is much worse over here.
 
I am no apologist, but please pick on us for stuff that is actually bad like our idiot politicians that are bankrupting the country and such.

Jeremy

Re:Kill me...kill me please.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Kill me...kill me please.

[jimicus]

Anyway, just because it's easy to learn doesn't necessarily mean that it's a bad programming language.

No, but sooner or later it means that there are a bunch of colleges churning out people who've become "experts" having taken a 6 week course in the language with no prior IT experience.

Doesn't take long for it to become apparent that so many people who claim to know the platform are inexperienced fools. Once that happens, salaries drop.

Better: be wide-minded

[faragon]

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).

Re:Better: be wide-minded

[the eric conspiracy]

become a plumber...

And spend the day cleaning out other people's shit? I don't think so. Not to mention that the pay is NOT as good as programming, and programming skills can be leveraged into better jobs. I did a career chance from another engineering field into programming - after 3 years of coding I am now a JOAT leading both a development team and a research team.
of

In 10 years all the programming jobs will be outsourced to India/China

Not hardly. Outsourcing is slowing down.

The safe rule: get a great education, heavy on the math, develop your writing skills and the world is your oyster. Even though I never had a formal course in computer science I can solve problems none of the computer science people I work with can touch because of the math I can do.

Math is the universal key.

Re:Kill me...kill me please.

[Silverstrike]

Will someone please explain to me why syntactical ease equates to a "stupid language for monkies"? Just because C# developers don't have to worry about and juggle memory pointers, it doesn't imply that their job is automatically "easier" and therefore "worse" than that of a C/C++ developer. They still have to worry about good OO design, portability of code (yes, even in a VM language like .NET), and just all around good software engineering -- same as a C/C++ developer would.

Furthermore, just because C/C++ is a "faster" language, that doesn't imply its better suited to web development, or even windows app development. A strongly typed language with a predefined API like the .NET Framework gives everyone an even playing field -- it makes code extremely supportable by a wide range of people; everyone who knows .NET can support an app written against the Framework. Not so for C/C++, a windows/Visual Studio C++ developer would certainly struggle after being tossed into a Unix development environment.

Now, this is the same argument as most people with common sense make with Java -- no on says its the right tool for every job, but it certainly can be the right tool for a lot of jobs. The same with C++. Do you really think we ought to code our web apps in C/C++? IF so, then why not just go all out and do it in assembly?

Why .Net?

[el_womble]

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.

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 .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.

So is it any wonder that there are less .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?

Re:Why .Net?

[azaris]

So is it any wonder that there are less .Net developers.

More likely the story is that the old Windows developers are clinging to VC++ and VB instead of making the transition to the new .NET languages. Many of these .NET jobs are probably converting legacy Windows apps to the .NET platform. You can't just throw away a codebase worth years of labor and start over with Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, or some other buzzword compliant flavor of the month.

I know we have to deal with this transition at work, so probably many others will have to, too.

Re:Why .Net?

[shutdown -p now]

If you want to switch IDEs, operating systems, and whatnot, then, indeed, Java is a better choice. But in many cases you just don't. The whole thing with .NET is that it works really nice in its native environment (which is Windows/IIS/MSSQL). There is a level of integration there between libraries, components, and tools that Java simply cannot afford (due to its cross-platformability). This is not to say that .NET is locked into this particular environment - you can use Linux/mod_mono/MySQL, for example - but it just won't give any advantages over existing solutions then. For MS shops, however, .NET is a blessing - and there are plenty of those.

Re:Why .Net?

[gh]

I agree with the other poster. This never should have reached a +5. Not only is it off topic, but the arguments are weak.

It can't be because CLR is faster than the JVM, it isn't.

The performance of the two runtimes are comparable. Neither kicks the other's butt. Like all things, you can find a benchmark that proves one is better than the other. At the end of the day, the apps that both Java and .NET are being used to write, performance is not going to be the reason you choose Java over .NET or vice-versa. You'll see a bigger performance gain if you simply design the right architecture for the platform.

as soon as you start to push its framework (as all real applications do) the .Net teams fall behind the J2EE teams.

I would beg to disagree with this statement. Personal experience has dictated the exact opposite. But, it would help if you provided an area where you feel .NET falls down. Otherwise, it just comes across as someone who keeps spouting the /.-think that Java is better than .NET soooo nyah!

Java gives you choice. Choice of IDE, choice of framework, choice of application server and perhaps most importantly choice of platform.

All that choice, as someone else pointed out, can be confusing. If you're building an application for an enterprise system you want to know what will get the job done. Not only that, but you want to know that it will be supported in a meaningful way down the road. The fact that Java has hundreds of frameworks (most of which duplicate functionality of other previously written frameworks) is actually a disservice. It's the old "jack of all trades, master of none", but applied to frameworks. The frameworks also mimic the fashion/pop culture than being technical solutions. This week it's struts, next week velocity, the following week some other framework. Enterprise solutions prefer solid choices, not the fad of the week.

You could make the argument that if the framework is open source, then you are guarranteed to have the framework down the road. But, that involves getting into the code and supporting the codebase. If it's critical to the company's environment they will do that regardless. In fact, likely the would have written/extended most of it themselves. The thing is that most of these frameworks are *not* critical in the "it gives us a market edge" sort of way. It doesn't make business sense to drain limited resources by supporting a toolset that turned out to be a fad and not properly supported down the road.

and expect to move over to Ruby on Rails (or whatever is flavor of the month) in 5 to 10 years

And that, dear /. poster, is exactly why many platforms like .NET do well in enterprises when compared to the many flavors of tools from the other platforms/communities. It's not that .NET (or Java for that matter) is miles above the rest in terms of technical superiority. It's simply that .NET offers a solid platform that business can depend on without wondering is this simply the flavor of the month.

Despite what most /. posters think, Java was successful for the exact reason .NET is becoming successful. The platform serves as good foundation for building applications that can be supported many years down the road. Think of it as what COBOL use to be for business. It's not the choice that Java presented, but a solid API and platform that will be built upon and supported by big players like Sun and IBM. That doesn't mean the choice isn't important in many cases, but in the grand scheme of things it's minor.

demand is back up

[DeveloperAdvantage]

Interesting, this past week there was another article about the potential for elimination of QA staff due to agile programming techniques:

http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?threa d_id=38785

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 .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.

Re:.NET? Who cares?

[Jugalator]

I don't intend to waste my time learning it, because it's dead-end technology for a dying platform.

... taking the "FreeBSD is dying" to new levels.

Windows and/or .NET is dying, yes, it sure looks like that on the top 5 list. *rolls eyes*

What list/article were you looking at?

Work experience

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me guess: they can't find programmers with 10 years .NET-experience?

What's .NET?

[Uukrul]

Visual Basic .NET, C# .NET, ASP .NET, ...
What the article says is that Windows Programmers Fall in CNN's Top 5 In-Demand.

MOD PARENT UP!

[TERdON]

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...

Re:.NET? Who cares?

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

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!

Resume interest

[Grad_2006]

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).

Re:.NET? Who cares?

[Rich0]

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...

Top In Demand Job: #6

[Anonymous Coward]

Furniture repairman at Microsoft.

Web RAD

[NutscrapeSucks]

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.

Crossover skills

[vinniedkator]

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.

Re:Kill me...kill me please.

[CaymanIslandCarpedie]

Wish I had mod points! Exactly correct, langauge really means nothing and I find this lists about as worthless as can be. Technology changes fast enough as it is, you don't need to make it worse by spending your career constantly chasing around the "hot" new programming language hoping you'll make a few extra grand a year!

Rule number 1) gain a solid understanding of computer, programming, design, network fundimentals. I doesn't matter if its Linux/Windows, Java/C++/.NET, etc, etc.

Once you have this solid foundation to build on then decide what industry segment you'd enjoy working in and learn that business segment inside and out.

I know as techies we often don't like dealing with getting our selfs "dirty" dealing with the business, we just like the tech but that will lead to a frustrating career in my opinion. Programming is becoming easier and easier, there is getting to be less and less value in being able to program any certain langauge, you can spend you entire life jumping between industries chasing the a few extra bucks in the lastest langauge or become an expert in an industry (where the real money is). When I'm looking to hire someone I couldn't care less what languages they know! As long as they are decent programmer its easy to teach them a new langange. Whats much more difficult is teaching them the fine points of our industry. So be it finance, retail, manufacturing, gaming, ect, etc. I think knowing a busniess well is much more important than what langauge you know.

Re:Kill me...kill me please.

[mdfst13]

"Doesn't take long for it to become apparent that so many people who claim to know the platform are inexperienced fools. Once that happens, salaries drop."

No. Once that happens, salaries *increase* but hirings decrease.

Most employers try to *avoid* hiring the inexperienced fools. As a result, they offer high salaries to the rare qualified coder.

Salaries don't drop until the demand actually drops, e.g. by the bubble bursting. A large supply of non-qualified coders doesn't affect qualified salaries. It just affects the cost of hiring. While in theory that cost could come out of salaries, in practice this only occurs in markets where demand greatly outstrips supply. Making it harder to find qualified coders makes them a more valuable resource.

Think about it. Who is more likely to get the job done. Five inexperienced coders? Or one experienced coder? Therefore, which would you rather hire?

Supply and demand

[ThePyro]

That definitely fits our experience in the Dallas area. We've tried twice in the last 6-8 months to hire another .NET developer, but both times we've come up short. Hundreds of resumes were submitted, and only about 5-10 of them had the .NET experience that we requested.

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.

Re:Supply and demand

[ThePyro]

Don't blame the guy you hired for your lack of investigation before hiring him.

Don't blame the guy who flat-out lied to us? Yes, maybe we should have investigated him better, but it's ridiculous to say that none of the blame falls on him. It's exactly that kind of mindset which leads people to lying on their resumes in the first place. They have no appreciation for the damage they do by misrepresenting their capabilities, thinking that it's somebody else's responsibility to clean up their mess.

We made a bad call, but that certainly doesn't let him off the hook.

Re:WHY??

[XMyth]

Wow, you don't know how to setup your DB connection so it's .NET's fault? Do you really think it's an instability in the language that causes random security exceptions? Companies are running multi-million dollar systems using .NET technology (and MS SQL Server for the back-end..migrated FROM Oracle! ooooohhh) and you think it's got some kind of stupid random security exception error?

I use .net

[Oz0ne]

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?

Does this supprise anyone?

[ninja_assault_kitten]

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.

Re:Does this supprise anyone?

[beemishboy]

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.

Re:Does this supprise anyone?

[radish]

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:

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. .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.

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.

framework standardization

[penguin-collective]

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.

Keep in mind that the writer of this

[IAAP]

article is a freelancer with a BA English. 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 .NET developer friend is making. That's about it. These folks make shit (this article probably got the authoer $200 at most) and they have to pump this crap out as fast as they can to just eat.

These writers don't know anything.

Re:Looking for slaves to Microsoft

[123abc]

".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"

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 .NET jobs out there.

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.

QA is not testing, testing is not QA

[metamatic]

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.)

And Tomorrow...

[MightyMartian]

And tomorrow it will be something else. You know, I've been an amateur to semi-professional programmer for over twenty years now, and at least once every couple of years I've heard the same spiel about this language or that platform. Oooh, "language x" or "library y" is going to revolutionize the industry. Abandon all your C++ code, it's irrelevant and you'll be a starving artist if you don't immediately shift gears, etc. blah blah blah

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.

Good Reason to Migrate.

[twitter]

Many of these .NET jobs are probably converting legacy Windows apps to the .NET platform. You can't just throw away a codebase worth years of labor and start over with Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, or some other buzzword compliant flavor of the month.

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.

Dead technology?

[RogueWarrior65]

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.

What the article says makes perfect sense.

[twitter]

TFA:

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.

C#/ .Net Devs REALLY are in huge demand

[chrisdrop]

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'm with you!

[ylikone]

I don't care if you and I will get moderated as flamebait or troll!!

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!

It's getting hard to troll like that.

[twitter]

Lilnobody presents a long flame of perl and claims no one would be hired to do perl work. With resources like the Wikipedia, such trolls are hard to pull off:

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.

Re:Kill me...kill me please.

[kurt_cagle]

>Furthermore, just because C/C++ is a "faster" language, that doesn't imply its better suited to web development, or even windows app development.

However, nor would I say that the implied corrolary, that C# is better suited to web development work, is true. Overhead on C# work in the web development sphere is in fact actually driving a lot of companies who HAD gone to ASP.NET to switch over to *nix/Ruby or Python.

Finally a general note - as someone authorized to hire programmers, I generally look for breadth of experience in a number of different languages and backgrounds. I KNOW that these people can learn .NET or Ruby quickly if they don't know it already, whereas I'm likely to be much more dubious about someone who claims.NET experience right out of college. Learn XML and a good declarative language (Haskell, Scheme or Ocaml perhaps), pick up some DECENT Javascript skills, a good strongly typed language like C# or Java, and dome background on work methodologies and design practices, and you'll be eminently more attractive to IT hiring managers.

VS versus emacs/gdb/gcc

[typical]

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.

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 .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.

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 .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.

* 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 .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).

* 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.

OOP != OOP

[pijokela]

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.

Question for the slashdot folks?

[Billly Gates]

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.

My experience in NYC financial

[Barcoder]

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.

We have high demand for "expert" .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.

We do find plenty of Java developers with enterprise experience and from rich software engineering experience. We've hired Java developers for .Net positions, and in all cases they have transitioned well and exceeded expectations.

So, for my company at least, we have high demand for "expert" .Net developers which is being met by java developers.

My company's experience might be unique considering we are in NYC, and many of the Java folks we interview are from large financials.