I had a background of Unix and Windows NT. I did both ASP.Net and PHP and switched back and forth between contracts for about 6 years depending on who offered t

I had a background of Unix and Windows NT. I did both ASP.Net and PHP and switched back and forth between contracts for about 6 years depending on who offered the most cash. I now sit at a Microsoft consultancy, on a Mac, doing all the high level technical design work and Unix bits the company needs (and occasionally digging the company out of the crap when they screw stuff up and the normal staff don't know what to do and Googling it is beyond them). Did I do the right thing? No. I should have skipped Microsoft stack entirely. I say this after 12 years of .Net and a previous 6 years of COM/C++/Win32. It has been the universally most stressful platform to work on. The technology is terribly complicated, obtuse and non-orthogonal and full of dead-ends and surprises. It's also virtually impossible to cleanly automate anything which means you need thousands of hands to push the buttons in the right order[1]. However this pales in comparison to the culture which almost universally (90%+ of outfits I've worked at) contains solely grim factory farm programmers who don't actually care what they are doing or understand what happens outside the ecosystem and outsourcers who whilst technically superior to the on-site staff, march around with loaded guns ready to shoot their own toes off (and anyone else dancing with them). The only good bit was the cash. I'd rather have picked up a 2003 OsCommerce site than do it again. Now I'm learning Objective C and Cocoa to solve a few real world problems in another non-technology market that IT rarely penetrates. I'm doing that on my own. [1] This has finally improved, but a little too late with PS and PS DSC for example.