Expensify CEO On 'Why We Won't Hire .NET Developers'

TheGrapeApe writes "The CEO of San Francisco-based, VC-backed startup Expensify wrote a post on the company's blog about why he considers .NET experience on a resume a general liability, saying that it will 'definitely raise questions' when screening for developers in his shop. Quoting: '.NET is a dandy language. It's modern, it's fancy, it's got all the bells and whistles. And if you're doing Windows Mobile 7 apps (which the stats suggest you aren't), it's your only choice. But choosing .NET is a choice, and whenever anybody does it, I can't help but ask "why?"' Does he have a point? Or is it counterproductive to screen devs out based on what platforms or languages they have used in the past?"

Comments

Money

[telchine]

But choosing .NET is a choice, and whenever anybody does it, I can't help but ask "why?"

I do .NET because that's where the money is. Next question please!

Re:Money

[WrongSizeGlass]

But choosing .NET is a choice, and whenever anybody does it, I can't help but ask "why?"

I do .NET because that's where the money is. Next question please!

I did a .Net project because one of my clients had existing applications written in VB and they needed them updated to a more current and stable incarnation that could be supported by their programmer. Does this clown think they should have re-done everything? I think we should all chip in to get him a gift certificate to the Asshat Haberdashery.

Re:Money

[SpryGuy]

I've done C, C++, Java, and half a dozen other languages in my development life.

While I loathe ASP.NET, I really like C# ... better than I like Java in fact. The Visual Studio development environment (with ReSharper added on) is really nice (though it's no IntelliJ IDEA). And I make a good living doing C# development.

To judge me negatively for this choice seems... odd. Prejudicial. Baseless.

I can understand if it was VB all the way, but come on.

Re:Money

[definate]

Exactly. A lot of jobs, and most of my C++ skills/knowledge transfer well.

This article is one of the stupidest things I've read in a while.

"Just press the right button and follow the beeping lights, and you can churn out flawless 1.6 oz burgers faster than anybody else on the planet. However, if you need to make a 1.7 oz burger, you simply can’t."

I assume by this, he means there's something you can't do in it, because all of the shit is built in. Well, I guess .NET isn't the ONLY solution to EVERY possible problem. Who would have known? Besides that, it's a pretty good solution, to many problems.

"Instead, we look for a very different sort of person. The sort of person who grew up cooking squirrels over a campfire with sharpened sticks"

Awesome. I never want to work for you. I've got several friends, and they're good friends, but they're retards. They are C purists, and like to write everything in more low level languages because it's "leet". They have lots of knowledge about C, understand some amazingly complex concepts, but get them to implement something simple, and they're going to write everything from scratch. Why? Because that's the kind of person who isn't used to using all this other code. Isn't used to finding other libraries, or just re-using someone else's code.

If they see .NET as bad on a resume, especially if that was on a resume from when the person worked at a reasonably large enterprise, and even more so if that was a windows environment, then they're retarded. If I saw a lack of it, especially when developing small applications, I'd be looking further at their work, to see if they really make smart decisions on the best language to use for the given solution.

I'd say startups don't use .NET and Windows in general, because of licensing. Simple. They don't have to cash to do it. You might also find that the people who have worked at startups are used to dealing with this, because of their own monetary constraints.

Re:Money

[Gutboy]

There is no licensing to use .NET. You can even get Visual Studio for free (Express editions) which have no restrictions on developing business applications.

Re:Money

[Penguinisto]

I do .NET because that's where the money is.

So do you love writing code, or did you just do it for the paycheck?

TFA (yeah, I read it, my bad) says they're looking for people who love to write code, and know how to do it well. They want coders who have a passion for what they do. They want coders who are flexible, and who are able to adapt. They want coders who are able to not only write apps, but who understand what's really going on deep down.

Honestly? I agree with the guy. If you're running a startup, and looking for long-term growth, your initial coders need to be more than merely competent.

I remember when I did a stint working for a small company... these guys, to be exact. They had two full-on coders, one hell of a script whiz who knew 3D/CG like the back of his hand, and they had me. I had to learn Qt in very short order, figure out the fun nuances of helping port everything from x86 to PPC (this was pre-Intel Mac). Oh, and we did all of our own documentation, for both the SDK (both code and our own home-grown CG-oriented scripting language) *and* the users. I had to pick up bits and bobs that I thought I'd never have to use after leaving school (dusting off rusty trigonometry skills, blending in gaming, artistic, printing/color, and a whole pile of other concepts). Oh, and we'd just bought the codebase for Bryce during that time and had to clean that up (this is where I learned that Kai Krause can be a very evil man...)

Long story short, in that environment, you had to be agile, and given the insane hours, you had to be agile, and you had to really love doing it. OTOH, I wouldn't trade that for anything. We were outright cowboys by big-corp standards, and had a ball doing it.

In an environment like that? There's zero room for cookie-cutter technologies, or cookie-cutter programmers. (not accusing you, just sayin').

Re:Money

[ColdWetDog]

I make close to 6 figures using real languages.

Most of us don't count the digits to the right of the decimal point.

Re:Money

[Giometrix]

I make 6 figures coding in c#. Your argument is retarded. And what's a real language anyway. WTF does that even mean?

Re:Money

[JAlexoi]

You don't want to work with them because they are a startup. You will not be able to handle the pressure in a startup. The 12hr workdays and weekend long workshops to ship a cool feature. That is common to most enterprise developers. Startups rarely look favourably at such people, while enterprise HR gobble up that crap like it's candy.
On the other hand I doubt that you will ever be a CIO at a company of the caliber your clients are. Not because you are not smart enough(I am not in a position to comment), but because you don't have the right education and MBA with BA experience. Unfortunately developers rarely rise to any BA role.

They don't have to cash to do it.

They actually do. Because MS has a good startup oriented programme. But people know that MS will hit them with licensing as soon as they smell the smallest amount of cash rolling in. And MS licenses are a hell to decipher... One of my former colleagues, that is the lead of MS sales department,has issues in explaining what those licenses mean.

Re:Money

[Belial6]

A real language is one that people who don't want to learn anything new are already familiar with.

Re:Money

[Sir_Sri]

Because you don't really want labview skills. You want engineers or physicists, and they can be trained up in labview if needed. That isn't to say people don't use labview, only that it's just a tool, and the hard part is learning the science or engineering. Most of the physicists I know still program in fortran (77, not even 95), but it doesn't show up on want ads for PhD in physics: must know fortran, because well... they can learn fortran.

CS and Software eng hiring is much more driven by business guys who, ask questions like.. I kid you not "Do you know HTML" (I got asked that in a job interview after my MSc in comp sci). The tools used shouldn't replace the knowledge that drives their use. However, if you did your CS degree and only learned to program using C++ the program probably wasn't very good, but in engineering you can do the whole thing with well.. labview. The question I suppose with .net is if you only really know .net do you know enough about programs to be any good at writing them.

But of course... you don't choose who offers you a job first, and they pay for .net, you learn .net. Because 50k/year programming .net is better than welfare, and better than 20k/year at macdonalds.

Re:Money

[narcc]

"Instead, we look for a very different sort of person. The sort of person who grew up cooking squirrels over a campfire with sharpened sticks"

I knew having that essential skill on my resume would pay off some day!

Re:Money

[grcumb]

I'd have thought striving to be independently wealthy would be an admirable goal - it's a lot easier to be a philanthropist when you don't have to worry about the roof over your head and where your next meal is coming from.

You'd have thought, but you'd have been wrong.

The pursuit and acquisition of wealth generally breeds greater stress and worry rather than less. Granted, there is a level of income below which one struggles constantly to manage even the most basic aspects of daily living.

Having lived on both sides of the divide, I can say with some assurance that living in poverty is debilitating, but so is significant wealth.

The one lesson of any value I've learned is that if you're really serious about helping others (or helping make important things happen), you're doing it already. Opportunities tend to look for people willing to accept them. You don't have to be rich or powerful to achieve important things. Most of the time, you'll find yourself pitted against the rich and powerful - at least you will if what you're doing represents any sort of change. Even then, there are always influential allies to be found. Put in enough hours, demonstrate - no, prove - your abilities and Good Things do happen.

But here's the catch. To do so is to accept uncertainty and risk as your constant companions. You are guaranteed to fail more than you succeed. Every victory, save a very choice few, will be temporary or mitigated by compromise. Your own needs and satisfaction will always take second place to those of others. You'll find yourself - as I do - older, wiser, largely contented, but with very little to guarantee a contented, comfortable retirement.

All of this, of course, runs counter to the American myth of Success, where the sole measure of influence and importance is wealth. Rightly or wongly, it highlights people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, relegating Knuth, Woz, Mohammed Younus and countless other more meritorious figures to the shadows. This is a distortion. It's not false, but it's fake.

In rare cases, wealth will accompany accomplishment, but that's not always the case, and if you let the former stand for the latter, that's all you'll have. As a wise man once said to me, 'If you go into the hills looking for gold, all you'll find is gold.'

Re:Money

[shutdown -p now]

TFA (yeah, I read it, my bad) says they're looking for people who love to write code, and know how to do it well. They want coders who have a passion for what they do. They want coders who are flexible, and who are able to adapt. They want coders who are able to not only write apps, but who understand what's really going on deep down ... In an environment like that? There's zero room for cookie-cutter technologies, or cookie-cutter programmers.

Cool, but how does it make the claim that .NET (and .NET alone, since he's singling it out - not even Java is getting the same treatment) is "cookie cutter technology"?

His premise is that you're railroaded if you do .NET development. He claims that, so long as your solution fits the prescribed pattern, it's easy (true, as with any other language+framework combo), but then he also says that if your requirements are non-standard, then it's impossible to implement in .NET. And that part is patently false - it's more expressive than Java, for example, and in some ways reaches the expressivity of e.g. Ruby (thanks to lambdas with type inference and extension methods).

Again, if he said that he's wary of people with only .NET (or only Java) on their resume, that would make some sense. But he's instead saying that merely having .NET on your resume at all is a negative sign as far as he is concerned. That's the part where it becomes clear that it's really a "my language is better than your language" pissing contest and nothing more.

By the way, I wonder - is Ruby on Rails a "cookie cutter" technology? I mean, it does a lot more for the programmer than even the best .NET web frameworks do. At the same time, its "convention over configuration" approach means that you're strongly rewarded for doing things in a prescribed way with minimal deviation (even though you're free to step aside if you want). So, do they also consider RoR experience negative?

The same, of course, can be applied to several dozen different frameworks written in and for a dozen languages, including all mainstream ones.

Re:Money

[gbjbaanb]

I think (or would hope) that he means that anyone trained in .NET development is the equivalent of the burger-button-pushers. They only know how to put the burger in the and press the lights,

That you can do more, or with different tools, isn't the point - it's that these devs are not trained to be that good.

This is perhaps the problem with the 'easy to use', 'developer productivity' languages. Whilst you'd never question that a dev who only know PHP is likely to be unable to turn his hand to the complex or unusual tasks, the same does apply a lot to the .NET devs too. Its not their fault, its not .NET's fault, its the way its designed. Its the way it's supposed to be as that's the design decisions that were made to make the language that gives you a lot of developer productivity.

However, I'd be more concerned about devs with *only* .NET on their CVs. They're not not going to worry about a C++ guy who has said he also did a bit of .NET, PHP, javascript, Ruby, Java, C, Smalltalk and Concurrent Euclid. Its the guys who only know how to drive Visual Studio that you do have to worry about.

Re:Money

[grcumb]

You're assuming the goal is wealth, rather than merely independence from the golden chains of wage slavery. For some people, there *is* such a thing as enough money.

Not really. I actually grant right up front that freedom from wage-slavery is pretty important. What I take issue with is the assumption that one can focus on the money first and then get to the important things afterwards. In my admittedly uncommon experience (I walked away from the corporate world in 2002 and have lived and worked in the developing world since then), waiting until you have the means to achieve important things leads to a lifetime of waiting.

In my home country (Canada), there was an ad campaign for a life insurance company, titled 'Freedom 55'. Its premise was that, if you work hard and save now, you'll not be too old to enjoy the benefits when they finally accrue. I always found them wryly amusing, because I was enjoying myself - fulfilling myself - already, and I was only in my thirties.

Now, I'm closer to 50 than 40. But I'm healthy, happy, with a rich and challenging home life. I do work that's demonstrably important to the development of my adopted country (and about 20 more throughout the region). In my own humble way, I've been able to assist in the development of a small but thriving society. I'm fairly well off by local standards, but if I chose, I could be much, much richer. The problem is that the time I spent chasing a secure income would be taking away from the very things that give me the greatest joy and fulfillment.

My argument, then, is: Why wait? What is so important about economic independence that it can't simply be considered one of several equally important corollaries that stem from the desire to lead an interesting life?

Re:Money

[Velex]

Well, I guess .NET isn't the ONLY solution to EVERY possible problem.

Interestingly I flirted with the system.net.mail namespace. He played footsie with me, and our first date was fantastic. I was absolutely thrilled, but when we met for our 2nd date, I asked him if he had a way of proving to one of my clients that he had actually sent an email I'd asked him to, for example, by providing the SMTP session upon request. He asked the waitress for another drink and said that no, he didn't.

I figured perhaps I could get my friend Eve to listen in on his communications with other mail servers, but Eve told me, "Girl, that dude's bad news. You don't want nothin' to do with him. Every time I tries to record his sessions, sister, he drops his socket at the first sign of a 200 response. My advice, girl, is if you's lookin' for something like that, you just best write your own emailer."

And so I did.

Idiotic

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using C# at work for some time now as a co-op, not because it was my first choice, but because that was what we were told to use. I know other languages, and I'm quite good with them.

It's just as well. Anyone who thinks .NET itself is a *language* isn't someone I want to work for.

Re:Idiotic

[SpryGuy]

That's simply no longer true. C# is very good at performance, and isn't even remotely a "scripting language". And you can use "real" application programming techniques, just as in any other language.

I think your perception of .Net in general is dated, and that's especially true of C#.

Re:Idiotic

[internettoughguy]

C# is very good at performance.

Compared to what? It's comparable to Java, and a lot faster than Python, but it's still a great deal slower than C++ or C.

That said it's a perfectly fine language, and is a good trade off between runtime speed and coding speed. If I had the choice I would go for Python, Java, C, C++ or a combination of those, simply because they are cross platform.

My experience

[Progman3K]

Only known ONE .NET programmer, and he was damned fine, thing is, he was a damned-fine C++ programmer too, so ...

Re:My experience

[Sycraft-fu]

Ya as far as I'm concerned each additional language you can actually demonstrate you know (as in have done a non-trivial project in) is another point in your favour. Why? Because it means three things to me:

1) You are a true programmer, not just a code hack. You understand how a computer actually thinks, how data is stored in memory, how a processor works, etc. You understand that languages are just tools to do a job, and all they do is help you describe to the computer what you wish it to do. If required you can pick up a new language with little trouble because you understand it is all the same process, just different grammar and syntax and so on.

2) Because of that you have flexibility and will use the right too for the right job. You won't spend hours in C trying to make a text parser that could be easily done in PERL, and you won't wast time futily trying to optimize a critical function in Java that could execute 50 times as fast in C++. You'll choose the language that is right for the given task to get it done quickly, efficiently, make it maintainable, and so on. Choices will be pragmatic, not ideological.

3) You can work in non-preferred languages if required. If there is an existing program written in something you don't normally use, but their developers want to keep it all in that language, you can adapt and use that. You won't feel the need to waste immense amounts of time rewriting the whole thing, or fighting with them to write the new parts in a different language that they don't want. You can adapt and use it, even if it is the suboptimal choice in your opinion.

Real programmers you aren't paying for their knowledge of a specific language. You are paying them for their problem solving and logic skills. They can think like a computer and put problems in to things computers can understand. Having a large number of tools for that is a good thing.

Good to know

[Sycraft-fu]

I'll make sure not to hire Expensify. Why? Well if they have a language-zealot mentality, then I'm not going to like what I get. That is the sign of code hacks, not developers. Real developers can develop in more or less any language. They'll have their favourites, of course, and use different ones for different jobs, but they won't write off a given language for ideological reasons.

I can totally understand and support not hiring .NET only developers, particularly if your market is non-Windows. I mean someone who only does .NET may well be the aforementioned "code hack" and of course is little use if you are doing Android development. but that you'd count it against someone that they have done it? That just speaks of ideological zealotry, not anything practical.

One of my coworkers is our UNIX and Linux lead. He runs those servers and so so well. He has hacked many a script to make Linux work well in our unique environment. He does back end development on our website, which is LAMP. However can can truthfully put .NET development on his resume. He has done some .NET stuff for the Windows side, and also does it as a consultant. It is not the only thing he does, but it is one of his many tools and I'd expect him to list it.

He's a very skilled individual and to exclude him because he has additional knowledge of MS development would be really stupid.

So to me, this CEO has proclaimed "Don't hire my company. We are zealots who will insist in coding in a certain language, even if your project would be better served by something else."

Thanks for the warning bud.

Re:Good to know

[yelvington]

I'll make sure not to hire Expensify. Why? Well if they have a language-zealot mentality, then I'm not going to like what I get.

That's not what the blog post is about.

And personally, I won't hire somebody who doesn't bother to read the citation.

Mutiplier

[igreaterthanu]

.NET (like Java and old versions of Visual Basic) lets stupid programmers who usually wouldn't be able to do anything at all, do a bad job of something. So I can see where it gets it's bad reputation from.

However, for intelligent and talented programmers, .NET increases the speed that they can write code greatly. Unless you are someone like Amazon, Google or Oracle then developer time is much more expensive than CPU and RAM costs. Desktop computers have been faster than we need them for years.

.NET is also simultaneously lower level than Java (it supports pointers and pointer arithmetic), and higher level (LINQ, extension methods, better generic support, F#, TPL), so I can't see why you could pick on .NET devs and not on Java devs.

You can't claim .NET is Microsoft only either, Mono runs on *nix and works absolutely fine for server code and most windows forms code.

Dear Slashdot,

[falzer]

Dear Slashdot,

Thank you for propagating this non-news publicity stunt in true Slashbot form. You never disappoint.

Love, Expensify

Next question: Who the fuck are Expensify?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the fuck are Expensify? What, if any, notable things have they accomplished?

Re:Next question: Who the fuck are Expensify?

[PopeRatzo]

Who the fuck are Expensify? What, if any, notable things have they accomplished?

Their main accomplishment for the purposes of this story is that they are rejecting a Microsoft product.

For some people, that's enough. After all, I'm sure the previous story praising Microsoft's Kinect left a bad taste in peoples' mouths, so this is just a little something to cleanse the palate. By my calculations, we should be about due for a story about revolutionary technological advances expected in the iPad 3. It's the weekend after all, and the adult supervision is probably home with their families.

This dude is an idiot. See quotes below.

[HornWumpus]

See, Microsoft very intentionally (and very successfully) created .NET to be as different as possible from everything else out there, keeping the programmer far away from the details such that they’re wholly and utterly dependent on Microsoft’s truly amazing suite of programming tools to do all the thinking for them.

The dude doesn't understand the first thing about .NET

It is not different from everything else out there.

Programming with .NET is like cooking in a McDonalds kitchen. It is full of amazing tools that automate absolutely everything. Just press the right button and follow the beeping lights, and you can churn out flawless 1.6 oz burgers faster than anybody else on the planet.

However, if you need to make a 1.7 oz burger, you simply can’t. There’s no button for it. The patties are pre-formed in the wrong size.

WTF? This dude is on crack.

Why did this even get posted on /.

Some pointy haired moron goes on a rant (that will likely be accepted on face value by a plurality of /. readers), why is this newsworthy. Why would anybody want to work for this twit. This story should be moderated flamebait and troll.

Re:Language flamewars today?

[BJ_Covert_Action]

Here, let me help. Perl was, is, and always will be better than Python at everything forever.

CIOs make choices about technologies

[Anonymous Coward]

Every CIO makes choices for the technologies used inside their companies. They also make choices for technologies to be avoided for a variety of reasons.

I'm a CIO and to be certain my company isn't stuck with single platform solutions or poor library choices,
a) all our software runs on Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Linux, Mac and Windows
b) The Linux client cannot use Mono (my choice). PERIOD. We don't allow those libraries on Linux at all.
c) The Windows client cannot have divergent capabilities from the other systems and needs to look and feel like other platforms.
d) We prefer BSD, MIT, Apache licensed FLOSS over GPL or LGPL. I have to sign-off on GPL/LGPL stuff. Commercial stuff needs my sign-off too, obviously.

I agree that this CIO may be going too far, but I do not disagree that .NET programmers have to work harder to write cross-platform. All parts of the world are churning out .NET programmers with that a single skill. THOSE are the developers I want to avoid on my teams. Cross-platform developers who happen to know .NET are not a liability unless they enjoy .NET programming too much.

OTOH, we do have clients that force .NET development for specific projects due to 3rd party mandated tools - ArcGIS, for example. My dev team hates working on that software, so we charge 30% higher rates for that work. ArcGIS is a specialized skill and easily supports the higher costs.

If I were running a Windows-only shop, then I wouldn't make the same decisions. Thank your-favorite-deity that I'm not.

Re:Language flamewars today?

[ustolemyname]

People normally don't flamewar over common knowledge, sorry.

Never used dotNet, but this guy is an idiot.

[hey!]

It is critical, absolutely critical, to hire the very best people you can find. The output difference in going from a bad to competent to good to great in a developer is exponential, but the difference in cost is merely logarithmic. Only a fool lets his personal prejudices stand in the way of finding talent, whether that prejudice is about race, religion, sexual orientation ... even development languages and platforms.

Maybe the candidate developed in dotNet because that's what he was asked to do by his boss. Maybe he thought C# was interesting, or would get him the job he wanted. Maybe he just *thinks* differently than you do, and so prefers dotNet to Java, Python, Ruby or whatever rings *your* bell.

What you are looking for is somebody whose talent ideally transcends languages and platforms. Somebody you could ask to write something in x86 assembler, and he'd learn it and turn out something pretty good, maybe not as fast as the average assembler programmer could, but the second time around he'd be on par in getting the job done and by the third he'd leave the average programmer in the dust. You want a creative problem solver, a deep thinker, a team player who knows when to take initiative, somebody with real grit and dedication to the success of the project.

What you want is all of that. But you'll never get it. That means *right from the get-go* you're talking about compromises. And this guy's thinking about blackballing applicants because they have experience he doesn't? Jackass.

Re:Language flamewars today?

[Samantha Wright]

Alright, time for some standards: "Why do you feel that Python is so bad? What do you find wrong with it?"

Impressions

[JBMcB]

FTA: ". Big things, like obscuring the networking stack under so many countless layers of abstraction that it’s virtually impossible to even imagine what bytes are actually going over the wire"

using System.Net.Sockets ...
IPEndPoint _p = new IPEndPoint (127.0.0.1, 80);
Socket _s = new Socket(_p, SocketType.Stream, ProtocolType.Tcp);
_s.Connect(_p);
_s.Send(...bytestream...);

Boy howdy, that's just buried in layers.

ha ha ha ha

[decora]

thank you for summing up the economy of the United States, circa 2000-2010

Exactly

[Weaselmancer]

It's not like every job I've ever had I was thinking "what will this make my resume look like, in the event I run into some language snob in the future?"

I'm in it to get paid. If there was money in it, I'd write COBOL apps to run on mainframes that are beowulf clusters of iPads. I have a family to feed and a mortgage to pay so I don't wind up homeless. I don't give a rats ass about much else. Pay me and I write code - that's it.

Can we have new editors, please?

[SecurityGuy]

Seriously. I'll do it.

I RTFA expecting, like most of you, to want to rip this guy a new one, but here's the thing.

He didn't say he won't hire .net developers. He said he considers it a liability and will want to know why you chose to learn it. He never said there were no good reasons. Hell, a lot of you have posted some. I don't know .net, but if it's what I had to learn to get something done that my client needed, it's what I would do.

So, dearest editors, how about not massively misrepresenting what people are saying? That, or let someone else do it.

Re:This is how I feel about Windows in general

[caywen]

What really undermines your *point* is that you think that somehow studying Windows development undermines ones judgement. It's not a bad judgement to learn a technology that is required of you. I started out a Linux and Java developer. I needed to port to Windows because that's where the market is. In doing so, I learned some .NET technology. What judgement should I have exercised? Quit the job? I think the better judgement is to be open minded and meet the challenges you're faced by learning.

The basics of your point are OK, of course. If I'm running a shop based on Linux, I'd probably skip the Windows developer resumes wholesale. Not a problem. We get that. If, however, I'm running a shop that makes a popular Mac app, I might be quite interested in Mac developers who have Windows development experience if I'm at all interested in the possibility of targeting the other 90% of PC's.