The penny dropped at > Last week I was trying to confirm that the CIL castclass This person is working in the Microsoft .NET ecosystem, in which the "you don'

The penny dropped at > Last week I was trying to confirm that the CIL castclass This person is working in the Microsoft .NET ecosystem, in which the "you don't need to know that" attitude is prevalent. The whole ecosystem is built around it, and I'm not for a second saying that is a bad thing. .NET technologies are powerful and effective. However, like the author I didn't find myself comfortable in that world. I tend to gravitate towards a certain kind of problem and my problem solving approach relies on fully understanding what is going on. While .NET Core (now just .NET) is open source, the don't-look-under-the-hood mentality is built into it in many ways, and I found my way of thinking to be at odds with it. After a few years of Windows .NET work I eventually moved to a C++/Python/Linux role and am a lot happier. I don't think the employer I was with for those years should have gone with the latter stack (but I emphatically don't think my new employer should have gone with the former - it's a different problem domain). It's not a criticism. I just feel more at home doing this kind of development. In short, if you find yourself reading the 30,000 line C++ file containing the .NET garbage collector implementation more than once, you may not be working in a technical environment best suited to your mental wellbeing.