5 ms·

I'm curious why you wanted to shift your next job to .NET? Money? Hedging it to be the future? Like the tech/languages/tools better?

StevePerkins 9y ago
I work for a company that does a lot in the SaaS backoffice space (e.g. Google Apps), and at the time we were launching a whole new product around Office 365. I just had a bit of "grass is always greener on the other side" envy of our Microsoft team. They were in a bit more sexy position in terms of management focus, their tech stack seemed intriguing, and the more I tinkered with C# the more I liked it. It seemed like everything I loved about Java, with extra features and syntactic sugar over the parts that I didn't like. .NET Core, and the idea of shipping your app with a self-contained runtime only megabytes in size, sounded amazing compared to the 300 MB Docker images we were building for our Java stuff. Everything about the Microsoft/C# team felt next-gen compared to the Google/Java team. I even bought a Windows Phone, and starting doing most of my web searches with Bing. Since then, the Office 365 project got shelved, and most of that team is gone. Microsoft is doing some interesting things to try and catch up with modern trends. But much of it is still smoke-and-mirrors at this point. The cold reality is that underneath all the "cloud" marketing, Microsoft's customer base is very much conservative enterprises and not-so-savvy SMB's. Customers are fine with Microsoft throwing in the cloud offerings as add-ons for the on-prem stuff... but the customer DNA still very much revolves around running on-prem software, one or two (or more) generations behind the current release. There just wasn't a thriving market for partners in the pure-cloud space. A lot of my career has been like that. My perceptions driven by what's happening with my current employer, without having a clear view of where the overall industry is heading. It's really 50% luck that I'm a well-paid senior Java developer today... because there were SEVERAL points along the way when I was tempted by what a past employer was doing with Delphi, or Ruby, or something else that in retrospect would have been a major career detour or setback.
- agentgt 9y ago
  Steve thank you so much for your detailed answer to my queries of pure curiosity! Next time I'm in Atlanta I would love to meet in person (btw thank you for putting your real live info online. I love learning about new people) and grab some beers (or whatever). I went to GaTech and my company is technically based in ATL albeit we are virtual. email is whatever @ snaphop dot com
yellowapple 9y ago
In my experience (from an end-user standpoint; I don't have much experience on the programming side of this particular front), C# w/ Mono is far less painful than that other "compile-once-run-everywhere" C-resembling VM-driven language. No idea how C# + .NET Core fits into this equation of pain.

StevePerkins 9y ago

I work for a company that does a lot in the SaaS backoffice space (e.g. Google Apps), and at the time we were launching a whole new product around Office 365. I just had a bit of "grass is always greener on the other side" envy of our Microsoft team. They were in a bit more sexy position in terms of management focus, their tech stack seemed intriguing, and the more I tinkered with C# the more I liked it. It seemed like everything I loved about Java, with extra features and syntactic sugar over the parts that I didn't like. .NET Core, and the idea of shipping your app with a self-contained runtime only megabytes in size, sounded amazing compared to the 300 MB Docker images we were building for our Java stuff. Everything about the Microsoft/C# team felt next-gen compared to the Google/Java team. I even bought a Windows Phone, and starting doing most of my web searches with Bing. Since then, the Office 365 project got shelved, and most of that team is gone. Microsoft is doing some interesting things to try and catch up with modern trends. But much of it is still smoke-and-mirrors at this point. The cold reality is that underneath all the "cloud" marketing, Microsoft's customer base is very much conservative enterprises and not-so-savvy SMB's. Customers are fine with Microsoft throwing in the cloud offerings as add-ons for the on-prem stuff... but the customer DNA still very much revolves around running on-prem software, one or two (or more) generations behind the current release. There just wasn't a thriving market for partners in the pure-cloud space. A lot of my career has been like that. My perceptions driven by what's happening with my current employer, without having a clear view of where the overall industry is heading. It's really 50% luck that I'm a well-paid senior Java developer today... because there were SEVERAL points along the way when I was tempted by what a past employer was doing with Delphi, or Ruby, or something else that in retrospect would have been a major career detour or setback.

agentgt 9y ago
Steve thank you so much for your detailed answer to my queries of pure curiosity! Next time I'm in Atlanta I would love to meet in person (btw thank you for putting your real live info online. I love learning about new people) and grab some beers (or whatever). I went to GaTech and my company is technically based in ATL albeit we are virtual. email is whatever @ snaphop dot com

yellowapple 9y ago

In my experience (from an end-user standpoint; I don't have much experience on the programming side of this particular front), C# w/ Mono is far less painful than that other "compile-once-run-everywhere" C-resembling VM-driven language. No idea how C# + .NET Core fits into this equation of pain.