3 ms·

My last experience at an MS shop identified what I believe to be the (intentional) reason. Microsoft has certifications for everything. The more people with Mi

My last experience at an MS shop identified what I believe to be the (intentional) reason. Microsoft has certifications for everything. The more people with Microsoft certifications you have the more they will give you discounts on their tech stack. This self-feeding beast creates businesses that become incentivized to hire people with MS certs to get more discounts on MS tech. Developers are encouraged to gain these certs and maintain experience in that MS ecosystem as well, which invests them in all things Microsoft. When you factor in the vendor approval process where everything under a single umbrella has been approved (usually, MS, AWS, Google) then as a developer, you know you'll have access to those tools when you go to another similar job. In much the same way that people are happy to invest in learning open source tools rather than internal company libraries, because the experience is portable outside of that single job.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
Nobody at my company has any certifications so that can’t be the reason. I think MS just has created a very comfortable and convenient world where it’s really easy to use Visual Studio and MS tools. Once you leave that world you have to deal with more setup work upfront. It’s really not a big deal once you are used to it but it’s a muscle that needs to be exercised and tends to atrophy when you use Visual Studio. And there is always the fact that nobody ever got fired for using MS. I remember when my team started using git, every time there was a problem we were asked why we weren’t using TFS where things “just” work. You need a certain amount of stubbornness to use tools against the mainstream opinion.