Those skills are not specifically for corporate jobs by the way. A typical MS shops (regardless what you build) will require at least .NET 2.0/3.5 with ASP.NET

Those skills are not specifically for corporate jobs by the way. A typical MS shops (regardless what you build) will require at least .NET 2.0/3.5 with ASP.NET (not even MVC), WPF, WCF, WWF, Silverlight, and SQL-Server. A typical Java shops would require you to know J2EE, Servlet, JSP, Tomcat/Websphere/JBoss, Maven/Ant, JUnit, XML (with some would ask of GWT experience). But a couple days ago I told myself to ignore the rat race. I then bought a Linux book specializing in command-line, a Vim book, and a Rails 3 book. (Why Rails? um, why not? it's better than those corporate tools). I don't care if I have to learn PHP. As ugly as it is, it's still better than using .NET tools (regardless if it's ASP.NET MVC or not). C# could be a better language, but I just want to use light-weight tools (even if it means I have to learn many-many tools). No more heavy weight tools. I noticed that the people who choose the lightweight path (C/C++, or LAMP/RoR) seems to be able to focus on what matters the most: learning skills that can last longer than .NET version 2.0.