C# is a nice language, too bad about its owner. PHP is a pretty ugly, but it's widely used. Are you just looking for a way to make money, or do you think that

C# is a nice language, too bad about its owner. PHP is a pretty ugly, but it's widely used. Are you just looking for a way to make money, or do you think that software might be your calling? Dice is giving you an accurate view of a large segment of the labor market, one that has plenty of entry-level, dead-end opportunity. You could advance your career for maybe five years, and then you will either stagnate or switch to management. At that stagnation point, you'll be making a comfortable living, and that might be satisfactory for you. For entry-level jobs with career-growth prospects, you don't need years of experience with any particular language. C would be fine, as long as you can use it well for 30-minute exercises under pressure on the whiteboard. What kind of exercises? Expect to see the sorts of questions TopCoder asks in its algorithm competitions, or the ones Google asks for Code Jam. Finally, I'd suggest that you consider the community around the language you pick. The culture around Ruby is much different from the culture around .NET. Which group of people do you want to work with every day?