6 ms·

Well, I personally would have a lot of caution inviting in someone who is familiar with .Net, out of concern that he would be a Trojan horse. He would be more

by wtbob 11y ago

Well, I personally would have a lot of caution inviting in someone who is familiar with .Net, out of concern that he would be a Trojan horse. He would be more familiar with proprietary than free software, and hence when confronted with the choice to either bring in what he knows or learn something new, under pressure, it's likely that he would try to bring in something from Microsoft or another proprietary vendor. No thank you. Free software is better for developers, better for my team and better for our company. Yes, rarely it's missing a necessary capability, and sometimes it's missing a nice capability, but it's normally quite as effective and, y'know, free. I share his surprise about the concern over someone with too varied experience. In my own experience, that's generally a plus, since such folks often have surprising depth along with their breadth. I also share his surprise about the concern over someone who's been contracting. I've run into contractors who basically just fill in the same template at every job, granted, but I've also run into contractors who are sharp and have — again — an amazing breadth and depth of experience. You just have to spend some time interviewing them to find out who is who. But, again, I'd have huge concerns about bringing in someone whose experience has been with Microsoft or Oracle or IBM. I'd be very concerned that he was just a glue monkey assembling bits & bobs of proprietary software and not an actual developer.

et1337 11y ago
I hear you, but .NET is open source now, and comes with a large open source community. </nitpick>
- eropple 11y ago
  Calling it a large open-source community is perhaps stretching the definition. When I look at the Java open-source universe, or the Ruby one, or even the Node one, I see a lot more activity and a lot more generally applicable, useful stuff coming out of any of those compared to .NET. Which is not to say .NET isn't fine--I use it for many things because I enjoy the language and what it lets me effectively target (you're not targeting the PlayStation 4 with MRI or Node). But the community still, despite very strong and laudable efforts from Microsoft, strikes me as anemic.
  - alkonaut 11y ago
    Depends on what you count into the community I guess. Making a language that already has a very large community open source, means that bit of open source has a very large community. Only a small fraction is active in developing open source applications on it, but a large user community is also a great asset.
    - eropple 11y ago
      Enh. Fair point, but if it's inactive, it kind of hurts at the same time. Everybody waiting for somebody else to fix a problem, nobody's contributing so we won't worry about issues or pull requests...
cableshaft 11y ago
Would you feel the same way about someone who is currently doing .Net but has experience with other technologies in the past, and still learns and uses non-MS technology outside of their current job? Like me, for example, I currently have a job doing .Net, but in my past I have several years experience working in iOS, a year working with a Java stack, I used to do PHP way back in the day, I use Python all the time for personal scripts, and I'm currently learning React-Native to update my mobile experience and get a couple new apps out there.
- wtbob 11y ago
  > Would you feel the same way about someone who is currently doing .Net but has experience with other technologies in the past, and still learns and uses non-MS technology outside of their current job? No, certainly not. But I've reviewed resumes of folks who were clearly just cogs in the Microsoft machine (without any indication that they were doing things with Unix & free software in their free time). I really am concerned about bringing in someone like that. I like your breadth of experience, particularly your usage of Python. Many of my concerns about .Net are applicable to iOS, and I have other concerns about Java, and still other ones about PHP, but anyone who uses Python is probably a good egg.
  - cableshaft 11y ago
    That's encouraging, thank you. I've had some frustration in interviews because interviewers I've encountered have only really paid attention to my most recent tech stack and job and seem to almost completely ignore the rest of my resume, despite working with a wide variety of tech and fields in the past successfully (games, mobile, web, startups, enterprise).
Delmania 11y ago
That's an incredibly naive filter. I'd estimate the vast majority of developers don't care too much about whether their technology stack fits some arbitrary ideal. A good interviewer would focus on gleaming out a person's understanding of the fundamentals, and more important, actual instances of problem-solving, creativity, and learning. > I'd be very concerned that he was just a glue monkey assembling bits & bobs of proprietary software and not an actual developer. You can remove the word proprietary and apply that claim to a significant number of developers, regardless of their chosen tech stack. > Free software is better for developers Citation needed.
- zeveb 11y ago
  > > Free software is better for developers > Citation needed. How about Joel Spolksy[1]? Any Windows developer will tell you about the time they spent four days tracking down a bug because, say, they thought that the memory size returned by LocalSize would be the same as the memory size they originally requested with LocalAlloc, or some similar bug they could have fixed in ten minutes if they could see the source code of the library. [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Biculturalism.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Biculturalism.html
  - eropple 11y ago
    And on the flip side, I've had potentially hours of source dives (because, spoiler alert, I have the .NET Framework source code on hand and have for a couple years now) made unnecessary because the MSDN documentation, which was made because they would like programmers to be productive, explained an edge case before I stepped on that rake. Compare to plenty of other environments where the source dive was the only option because the documentation was an atrocity. It's not nearly as cut-and-dry as you want it to be and you will be better at your job when you internalize that environments you don't like have pluses of their own. I choose to use Unix for my own projects because it makes sense for the projects I'm working on (the stray game-development project aside), but I have declined to participate in the epistemic closure of those who think Windows and .NET have nothing to offer or to teach.

by wtbob 11y ago

et1337 11y ago

I hear you, but .NET is open source now, and comes with a large open source community. </nitpick>

eropple 11y ago
Calling it a large open-source community is perhaps stretching the definition. When I look at the Java open-source universe, or the Ruby one, or even the Node one, I see a lot more activity and a lot more generally applicable, useful stuff coming out of any of those compared to .NET. Which is not to say .NET isn't fine--I use it for many things because I enjoy the language and what it lets me effectively target (you're not targeting the PlayStation 4 with MRI or Node). But the community still, despite very strong and laudable efforts from Microsoft, strikes me as anemic.
- alkonaut 11y ago
  Depends on what you count into the community I guess. Making a language that already has a very large community open source, means that bit of open source has a very large community. Only a small fraction is active in developing open source applications on it, but a large user community is also a great asset.
  - eropple 11y ago
    Enh. Fair point, but if it's inactive, it kind of hurts at the same time. Everybody waiting for somebody else to fix a problem, nobody's contributing so we won't worry about issues or pull requests...

cableshaft 11y ago

Would you feel the same way about someone who is currently doing .Net but has experience with other technologies in the past, and still learns and uses non-MS technology outside of their current job? Like me, for example, I currently have a job doing .Net, but in my past I have several years experience working in iOS, a year working with a Java stack, I used to do PHP way back in the day, I use Python all the time for personal scripts, and I'm currently learning React-Native to update my mobile experience and get a couple new apps out there.

wtbob 11y ago
> Would you feel the same way about someone who is currently doing .Net but has experience with other technologies in the past, and still learns and uses non-MS technology outside of their current job? No, certainly not. But I've reviewed resumes of folks who were clearly just cogs in the Microsoft machine (without any indication that they were doing things with Unix & free software in their free time). I really am concerned about bringing in someone like that. I like your breadth of experience, particularly your usage of Python. Many of my concerns about .Net are applicable to iOS, and I have other concerns about Java, and still other ones about PHP, but anyone who uses Python is probably a good egg.
- cableshaft 11y ago
  That's encouraging, thank you. I've had some frustration in interviews because interviewers I've encountered have only really paid attention to my most recent tech stack and job and seem to almost completely ignore the rest of my resume, despite working with a wide variety of tech and fields in the past successfully (games, mobile, web, startups, enterprise).

Delmania 11y ago

That's an incredibly naive filter. I'd estimate the vast majority of developers don't care too much about whether their technology stack fits some arbitrary ideal. A good interviewer would focus on gleaming out a person's understanding of the fundamentals, and more important, actual instances of problem-solving, creativity, and learning. > I'd be very concerned that he was just a glue monkey assembling bits & bobs of proprietary software and not an actual developer. You can remove the word proprietary and apply that claim to a significant number of developers, regardless of their chosen tech stack. > Free software is better for developers Citation needed.

zeveb 11y ago
> > Free software is better for developers > Citation needed. How about Joel Spolksy[1]? Any Windows developer will tell you about the time they spent four days tracking down a bug because, say, they thought that the memory size returned by LocalSize would be the same as the memory size they originally requested with LocalAlloc, or some similar bug they could have fixed in ten minutes if they could see the source code of the library. [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Biculturalism.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Biculturalism.html
- eropple 11y ago
  And on the flip side, I've had potentially hours of source dives (because, spoiler alert, I have the .NET Framework source code on hand and have for a couple years now) made unnecessary because the MSDN documentation, which was made because they would like programmers to be productive, explained an edge case before I stepped on that rake. Compare to plenty of other environments where the source dive was the only option because the documentation was an atrocity. It's not nearly as cut-and-dry as you want it to be and you will be better at your job when you internalize that environments you don't like have pluses of their own. I choose to use Unix for my own projects because it makes sense for the projects I'm working on (the stray game-development project aside), but I have declined to participate in the epistemic closure of those who think Windows and .NET have nothing to offer or to teach.