
CEO Friday: Why we don’t hire .NET programmers - ayu
http://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont-hire-net-programmers/
======
Johngibb
This strikes me as the rantings of a CEO who doesn't have any touch with the
reality of development. Thanks for the offer, but I wouldn't want to work for
you anyway ;)

In all seriousness, I just don't buy that .NET is an amateur language that
prevents you from doing certain things. C# is a great, rapidly evolving
language with a lot of functional programming features built in. On the other
hand (as a developer who used C# for almost 4 years), I felt it gave me more
freedom than most other environments. You can even drop down to pointer
manipulation in performance critical areas when needed...

And with all the support for asynchronous programming, it makes it easy to
write truly scalable web applications with a similar paradigm to Node.js.

And ASP.Net MVC is really nice... if I weren't developing on a Mac and in love
with Heroku, I'd probably be using it over Ruby on Rails.

tl;dr; - your rant is only applicable if you are only talking about VBA
developers. Modern C# on .NET with ASP.NET MVC is a pretty nice environment.

~~~
gamble
.NET is a pretty good implementation of a Better Java. It doesn't even suffer
from some of the cultural problems of Java.
(FooDelegatorHandleFactorySingleton...)

It _is_ a thoroughly corporate ecosystem, though. The vast majority of .NET
programmers are work-a-day IT department developers. There is a lot of
deference to MS on tools, language features, and libraries. MS developers will
tend to wait for MS to incorporate something into the official platform rather
than creating open-source projects to fill the same need. (eg. ASP.NET MVC)
Even Java is better in this regard. It's hard to imagine something like
Clojure emerging from the .NET community.

~~~
greenyoda
From <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Hickey> \--

"Before Clojure, [Rich Hickey] developed dotLisp, a similar project based on
the .NET platform."

Thus it looks like Rich Hickey was in fact a .NET developer at some point, and
so Clojure did, in a way, emerge from the .NET community.

~~~
gamble
Interesting. I'd never heard of dotLisp. I'd love to know why he decided to
move to the JVM.

------
DanielBMarkham
I wish the author of this piece the very best with his squirrel restaurant
franchise.

Seriously, what the hell is this guy going on about? The fact that large
companies that create huge ecosystems also create cookie-cutter ways of doing
things? And this is bad?

I've coded in just about everything out there except Haskell and Lisp. I've
worked with heavy web-centric systems, distributed systems, P2P systems, and
so on. I've written drivers, shell extensions, and rules-based database
applications. And yes, it's true, I'm moving more to linux and F# on mono
lately. But that's because of licensing and scaling issues, not because the
.NET stack is somehow defective. In fact, if .NET were a liability, I would
very quickly jump into something else. But it's not.

It's also true that there are a LOT of .NET developers who understand the
cookie-cutter approach and can't go outside a very small comfort zone. But
that's a product of being the world-wide standard, not a product of something
gone wrong. When you own the game, hundreds of thousands of folks are going to
go through 6-week "learn .NET!" courses and come out the other end button-
pushers. If anything, those guys are a sign of a mature market, which is a
good thing.

And what's this about .NET being a language? He acts like this entire system
is similar to what? Javascript? .NET is a platform which runs dozens of
languages with hundreds of thousands of easily pluggable libraries. If you're
coding C++ in .NET writing unmanaged code you're doing something completely
different from some guy dragging and dropping controls on a web page in VB.NET

This article shows the worst thing about all of us as programmers: we tend to
run on assuming that we are experts in areas where we have the slimmest idea
of what the hell we are actually talking about.

In fact, I feel this article is so bad that it has to be a joke: a poke with a
sharp stick just to incite a lot of invective comments, like this one.
Fricking linkbait. Bah.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I don't think its a joke, I think the CEO was genuinely trying to share that
he had seen a lot of correlation between folks who programmed in .NET and
people who weren't a good fit for his company.

I get similar negative vibe when I talk to people who don't use data
structures (seriously I interviewed a guy who wrote a frickin' file system
that was linear arrays, all the way down)

But it doesn't mean there aren't jobs that aren't a great fit for those folks,
and this is where I think a lot of these discussions go off the rails (if you
will forgive the pun).

If I am a programmer who loves .NET, and I read this, I can choose to take it
in a couple of ways, I can be offended that this guy has just hugely
disrespected me and all my .NET lovin' friends, or I can be glad to know that
I don't need to bother myself talking to any of his recruiters that are
scouring the globe. As I tried early and often to drill into my kids, you
can't control what people say but you can control how you choose to feel about
it.

"This article shows the worst thing about all of us as programmers: we tend to
run on assuming that we are experts in areas where we have the slimmest idea
of what the hell we are actually talking about." -- I think what you were
trying to say here (but don't let me put words in your mouth) is that it is a
mistake for programmer's to take what they know about themselves and to
generalize it to everyone else indiscriminately. I would be happy to interview
.NET programmers if they were willing to try other methodologies and
languages. However I will relate that I have met people who have found God's
Own Language (and it varies from person to person which one it is) and refuse
to try any other language, or any other development methodology. If that isn't
compatible with mine then we both should know that it won't work well.

The author gives a good description of the kind of people he would like to
work with, that is valuable because in reading it you can get a feel for
whether or not you would like to work with him. So its a win - win.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
In your reply, I think you touch on an interesting aspect of this: why did it
push so many buttons?

I really think it has very little to do with .NET -- I can take .NET or leave
it, depending on the nature of my needs.

I think it has much more to do with the smart-ass feeling you get reading it,
combined with the fact that, if you're any good at all in the .NET universe,
_you know better_.

That made me think of all the times I've spoken to developers when they just
_knew_ that such-and-such was true. And it wasn't. That same snarky attitude,
that same over-generalizing, that same use of silliness to try to mask the
predjudice.

I wouldn't throw out working with this clown. Who knows? Might be fun. But the
attitude is worthy of comment, and, since I have been known to be this way
myself, I feel like I can honestly jump in.

But really, who this guy wants or doesn't want, or what his opinions are don't
matter that much. The interesting question would be how he deals with
realizing he doesn't know so much. That's true for anybody.

------
DanielStraight
Great assertions. How about some evidence or examples?

.NET was created to be as different as possible from everything else out
there? Show me at least one example. Further, show that it was deliberately
done in order to be different.

Backslashes in path names? What does this have to do with .NET?

Left-handed coordinate system in DirectX? What does this have to do with .NET?

A dozen complex files before you even write a line of code? When I start a new
.NET project (desktop), I get an XML and a basically-XML file that are so
straight-forward that I regularly modify them in a plain text editor, and I've
never even read the documentation on them.

Allergic to open-source licensing? I use at least a half dozen open source
.NET projects on a daily basis.

Every day with .NET takes two days to unlearn? The author is just throwing out
random numbers and ideas at this point.

The author comes across as having nothing but preconceived notions of .NET.
I'm with the others. I wouldn't want to work for you... or even with you.

------
copernicus
I'm really not sure where to begin with my criticism of this article. Perhaps
the McDonalds kitchen straw man. Or maybe the outright fabrications like:

"Big things, like obscuring the networking stack under so many countless
layers of abstraction that it’s virtually impossible to even imagine what
bytes are actually going over the wire."

The only actual examples of "incompatibilities" that weren't lies were
trivialities -- who cares if DirectX is left handed or right handed? Flipping
your Z axis is trivial.

As someone who has extensively used both .NET and other platforms (C++, Java,
etc.), this article strikes me as the naive views of someone who hasn't
learned enough .NET to form a cogent opinion.

------
smokinn
Wow I hope this guy is just trolling. I haven't done much C# programming
myself but the best coder I know built a HFT platform on .NET that made
millions of dollars.

If this CEO wouldn't hire that guy because he's a ".NET programmer" then he
has more important issues to deal with than his technology stack.

Also, his definition of a .NET programmer is hopelessly out of of date:

 _Programming with .NET is like cooking in a McDonalds kitchen. It is full of
amazing tools that automate absolutely everything. Just press the right button
and follow the beeping lights, and you can churn out flawless 1.6 oz burgers
faster than anybody else on the planet._

Ummmm no. You're not describing the .NET platform. What you're describing is
the old VB6 winforms-style or MS-ACCESS-style coding that was popular 5-10
years ago. The .NET platform has moved much much further than that in a short
period of time.

------
cosgroveb
I realize this is just linkbait, but I'll bite.

I probably wouldn't want to work for such a narrow-minded person and I am not
a .NET coder (may I never write Enterprisey code again!)

I realize he's probably just trying to use an imperfect filter to narrow the
field of candidates but a lot of his criticisms extend to any framework,
whether we're talking about Swing or RoR. Every tool you choose will limit you
in some way. Oh well.

------
allanchao
Wow, this is the most personally insulting article I've ever read on HN. I've
been programming since I was 8, worked at a successful startup (that used .NET
exclusively), and do most of my pet projects on the MS stack.

I can't agree with him on any of his examples on why .NET is a bad platform.
Backslashes and coordinates systems are trivial. I can't imagine any point for
any startup where it's necessary to know the bytes going over the wire when
dealing with networking. Code generation is an incredible time saver, and can
easily be deleted if the generated code is unnecessary. Expensive servers have
nothing to do with quality of code. I've never heard of a .NET developer
allergic to open source, not to mention that also has very little bearing on
quality of code.

I would propose that the platform is a tool, and a developer who can only use
that one tool is limited. But it's totally ridiculous to discriminate against
someone for knowing how to use the tool and having experience with it.

~~~
teen
hes wrong about the "bytes over the wire" bit anyhow, it's pretty
straightforward actually

------
snprbob86
While the McDonalds kitchen analogy is _kinda_ applicable, the theory of
malicious lock-in is just plain silly.

Did it ever occur to you that just maybe Microsoft's customers are big
corporations that routinely employ the programmer equivalent of french fry
managers? And maybe, just maybe, Microsoft's products are highly successful at
achieving the benevolent goal of engineering a product for their target
audience?

As a former hard-core .NET developer and Microsoft employee -- who hasn't run
a Windows box at home since nearly two years before quitting Microsoft -- I
agree that most .NET developers are kinda lost in a Microsoft-crafted echo-
chamber la-la land. But I don't agree that it's got anything to do with
nefarious intentions, rather it's got to do with social dynamics and
product/market fit.

------
bryanlarsen
This article deserves to be slammed, and it's been well slammed, but there's a
nugget of wisdom inside it:

Once you've exhausted your friend-of-a-friend type referral hiring, you need
some way of turning thousands of resumes into tens of resumes for
interviewing.

And no matter what filter you use, there are lots of examples of good
candidates who fail it. The canonical example is GPA. The ratio of good
programmers to poor programmers is higher in those with high GPA's (IMO), but
there are tons of good programmers who flunked out of college.

There are lots of crappy .NET programmers out there, so filtering out .NET
programmers will discard a lot of chaff. There'll still be wheat in the chaff,
but you've got to get a shortlist somehow.

An even better filter might be to filter out anybody who calls .NET a
language. Would that mean they have to fire the CEO too?

------
wvenable
> They write everything from assembly to jQuery, on PCs to mobile phones,
> doing hard core computer graphics to high level social networking. They’ve
> tried everything. Everything, that is, but .NET.

I've written everything from assembly to jQuery and written software in C++
for mobile phones. I'm not a fan of either computer graphics or social
networking but I've written a ray-tracer and built a few popular websites.
When I'm not working in other technologies (which is much of my day job) I
also dabble in .Net. Why? Because it's an absolutely fantastic platform for
getting stuff done in Windows.

I'm working on a little hobby project right now in .Net that interfaces with a
piece of embedded hardware. .Net has been crazy effective for it: low-level
bit twiddling is a breeze without the programmer overhead of C/C++ (don't even
bother trying it in Java). I even made sure it's possible to port it to Mono
for Linux users. And those tools that "make 1.6oz burgers"; I'm using those.
The project also requires a whole bunch of boring CRUD work and I auto-
generated at least half that work away. Sometimes you don't need 1.7oz burgers
so why waste a lot of time and effort replicating that capability for nothing?

I think you'd be remiss to hire someone who _only_ knows a single technology,
whether that be .Net, Java, or PHP. But I don't think .Net is some kind of
poison for the mind.

~~~
nollidge
Moreover, if you _did_ need 1.7oz burgers (Jesus, what a horrendous analogy),
the only thing potentially standing in your way would be your own ignorance of
the framework.

Sort of like what's standing between this company and some very talented
developers.

------
sp4rki
I honestly would never work for this guy. I have a C, Python, Java, Ruby
background (as in what I've used in past jobs), and I'm working with .Net
currently even though I'm a Ruby fan. I find C# and ASP MVC, pretty freaking
good, even though I'm a Windows hater. Close minded people like this dude
don't deserve good programming talent at all.

I might not be one of the best programers ever (I'm probably not!), but even
if I was I'd send the same message to this guy: "I play almost every stringed
instrument from the violin to the piano. I can juggle up to 5 objects with
ease. I know a quite a few magic tricks. I'm freaking special and I will never
work for a narrow minded person such as yourself. Even if you pay me a
quadrillion nigerian dollars."

------
teen
i applied for a job with expensify about 3 months ago. the interviewer asked
in what language i wrote a web app from my portfolio. i said c#. he said, and
i quote "you can make websites in c#?" he literally had never heard of
asp.net. yet is ragging on .net in this blog post.

their office was just 1 room, with 3 guys sitting at a single table. they kept
offering me a beer. i guess it was to seem hip, seeing there's no real reason
to have a beer during a job interview.

another funny thing from applying is in the coding test they show you how to
connect to their api using javascript, but it would never work because of
cross domain restrictions. they probably have only tried it over localhost ;p

i wound up not getting the job because i used the kohana mvc framework in the
coding test and they 'couldnt understand my code.' i think in all i wrote less
than 150 lines of clear, commented code, but they dismissed it outright
because i used these things called classes. im sort of glad i didnt get the
job, because i got a job paying literally double their offering salary the
next day.

------
benologist
"keeping the programmer far away from the details such that they’re wholly and
utterly dependent on Microsoft’s truly amazing suite of programming tools to
do all the thinking for them."

Kind of the whole point of frameworks. Including jQuery which they're using.

------
MatthewPhillips
"But choosing .NET is a choice, and whenever anybody does it, I can’t help but
ask “why?”"

Because in certain pockets of the country 90%+ of the jobs are in .NET.

"See, Microsoft very intentionally (and very successfully) created .NET to be
as different as possible from everything else out there"

? It's almost exactly like java.

~~~
ronnier
I was pretty much a 100% .NET guy before joining Amazon in January. Without
reading a book, I was immediately able to start writing Java at Amazon because
of how similar it is to C#.

------
keithwarren
Follow up article: Why I would never hire a CEO as clueless as this guy...

------
athom
Actually, I'm surprised no one else touched on this part yet:

 _See, experience is cheap. All it takes is time. Skill is harder, but really
only requires hard work — a lot of people can get that. But attitude. You
either have it, or you don’t._

So, what he's saying is, experience is cheap, hard work is cheap
(seriously???), but attitude, now _that's_ worth something? I think I see the
point about his programmers beating up everyone else's.

I say, let him have all the attitude he can choke on. I'll settle for the hard
work and experience, thankuveddymuch!

------
daeken
I'm going to keep my response brief: 1) .NET is not a language, and calling it
such is just silly. 2) I've built everything from insanely high-performance
emulators (IronBabel) to kernels (Renraku) to computer vision applications
(not announced yet) using .NET; all of these are "1.7oz burgers", and all of
them were performant, flexible, and easy to build.

Troll, troll, troll...

------
candlejack
This should be a giant red flag to anyone who is considering working at
Expensify (as long as this CEO is around). I see this "we're hiring the best
developers in the world" mentality from time to time at small startups and
honestly it borders on delusional. You write software which makes expense
reports and you've made some money. You aren't working on anything that would
interest one of the best developers in the world and I seriously doubt you're
prepared to pay what it takes to employ one.

We all know that working in .Net means about as much as a carpenter using a
saw. Drawing conclusions from it is just another example of very poor
reasoning skills.

In the end this is just linkbait and I hope the CEO apologizes publicly for
making a poor decision in publishing it.

------
jgh
Why does a company that creates expense reports need "the best programmers in
the world"?

~~~
athom
Apparently, so they can beat up everyone else's programmers.

Exactly what that contributes to programming _or_ expense reports is anyone's
guess.

------
kenjackson
This article probably does more to hurt expensify than it says anything about
.NET development. I'd seriously hope that any CEO I work with would come talk
to a dev before writing something like this.

------
smhinsey
I have a hard time taking this seriously beyond the ".NET is a language"
statements. I don't think most of his statements really apply to C#, but they
certainly don't apply to F#.

This is cargo cult management at its finest. The author is clearly one step
above knowing absolutely nothing about this at all. It reads like he got
burned by a bad hire and now everyone who shares traits in common with that
person is also a bad hire.

------
ecoffey
I feel like he is both right and wrong, and for all the wrong reasons.

His hunch is that for the most part .Net developers are bad, and by and large
I agree with that. Because .Net is used in a lot of Enterprisey places, and
it's so easy to get a job in it right out of school you find a lot of just
horrible code, and broken mindsets about programming _in general_. All of the
idiocy I find in .Net is usually just someone who wouldn't know how to solve
their problem in any other programming language either.

But he's wrong that that is a direct result of .Net in general. I feel you
could swap out .Net for Rails: "oh all you know is how to run `rails g
scaffold` therefore you're not worth my time". That is _wrong_. Like Rails,
.Net provides abstractions over _mechanics_ , but you will be a happier, more
confident programmer when you can understand the intent of those abstractions,
and maybe even take a theoretical stab at how you would implement it. That
goes for any platform you develop on.

Personally I think I've grown a lot as a developer in general over the past
few years using .Net professionally. Despite the stigma I've met a lot of
smart developers, and C# has helped me hone how I like to think about and
solve problems in general. I'm sure it helps that I do a healthy amount of
other hacking outside of it all to give me perspective, but I certainly don't
feel stupider for being exposed to things like LINQ, which helped my grok
Monads and embrace more Composition style programming in a fuller way.

------
brok3nmachine
The Author of this article obviously has some misconceptions about .NET, and
has probably had some bad experiences with enterprise developers. I've worked
at two very successful startups that have used .NET for high traffic web
development (and no, I'm not talking about MySpace). Some sites dealing with
5million + page views a day, and some of our .NET services would handle
5billion+ requests a month. It is great for large teams, the CLR is well
optimized, and C# is a beautiful language in itself (although the platform
supports many scripting and functional languages). I believe what the Author
really means, is stay away from seasoned Asp.net web form developers who have
never strayed from .NET and have no experience in an agile environment... if
you are looking to hire for your startup. I've been hiring quite a few
developers recently for the once startup I'm currently working at, and when
recruiting I make sure to never start discriminating based on the language
that an engineer develops in. I've hired programmers who were mainly
developing in C++, Java, Python, PHP, and many other languages. If they are
Jr, you just need to be super smart problem solver with decent programming
skills. If you are Sr./Lead, you need high traffic experience, along with
being well skilled with a strongly typed language, among other requirements.
These kind of candidates have done extremely well, and enjoy the .NET platform
that we mainly develop in. And me personally, I prefer .NET, but if the team
and product is great, I would be happy to work with Ruby, Python, .NET, Java,
etc... I think my PHP days are over though=)

------
notque
I dislike .Net. I enjoy perl/python more.

I work on a .Net app now. It has tons of complexity that any other app has, if
anything more complexity because of the requirements put around you.

Perl and Python are like poetry. You can do whatever you want.

.Net is like a haiku. You have limitations, but often times those very
limitations are what allow you to focus on the true meaning of the code, and
what it should be doing.

I think there is some level of truth to the article, but it's overstating it,
which is clear.

"Why we don't hire .Net programmers" turns into ".NET on your resume isn’t an
instant showstopper. " turns into "If you are a startup looking to hire really
excellent people, take notice of .NET on a resume, and ask why it’s there."

So ask why it's there. Just like ask why Python is there, or ask why Perl is
there.

So really, what you're saying is, it's important to ask why they programmer in
the particular languages they choose, and use that information to determine
why they do what they do. Prefer people who do it like a hobby as opposed to
those that do it as a job.

Great. But what does that have to do with .Net? Oh yeah, you just don't like
it.

That's fine, I don't either but I don't immediately think a programmer is bad
because they use .Net.

I think that they are bad because they use PHP.

------
chillitom
What. A. Moron. Talk about a mega-facepalm! How is bigotry supposed to entice
people to your firm?

------
blahblahblah
Apparently, this guy skipped "Intro to the Theory of Computation" class on the
day they covered the concept of Turing completeness. The notion that there is
any program that can be written in any other Turing complete language that
cannot also be written in one of the Turing complete .NET languages is
provably wrong. End of story.

------
cl8ton
Excuse me while I go and remove Expensify...

I started programming out with MSC 5.1-> Borland C++ 5.0-> MS C++-> MS C# and
have never looked back.

It's elegant, powerful and gets out of your way when you need to deep dive.

I would suggest you take another look at it and don't confuse all .NET
developers with VBA script kiddies.

------
yummybear
I'd say this is clearly written by someone who hasn't worked with .NET.

------
jswinghammer
That's fine I guess but you will miss out on good people even though you don't
think you will. The reasoning here suggests that .Net doesn't require you to
do anything outside of controls and drag and drop which isn't in my experience
very true at all. I've been able to some the occasional control for what I do
but it's never anything fancy at all.

What platform are you using that doesn't abstract the networking stack?
Network programming in C isn't that _that_ different than in C#. The same
basic concept of I/O is there and the APIs basically work the same way.

Also .Net isn't a language. I guess you are referring to C#.

------
ABFrep
I agree with previous posts, I don't know any programmer who can 'choose' the
language. Usually it's the boss who selects the language the whole team uses.

And then it's a job to pay bills and maybe child support.

But, clearly it's just his opinion, as he makes references to backslashes or
forward slashes. It's an uninformed opinion?

In certain circles, we call this trolling. He knows what kind of response he
will get. He's attacking .NET programmers. Let's see how they respond, etc.

------
EricTetz
Wow. Circa 1980's "Micro$oft" rant from a 2011 CEO. No wonder they're having a
hard time hiring.

I think the real moral of this story is: (1) avoid technology religion and
it's practitioners, (2) if you're cooking steaks on a gas grill and you see
your CTO warming up a dead squirrel over a book of matches, find another job.

------
Hominem
Ok I am going to defend the guy somewhat. He clealy can't be talking about C#
or any other CLR languages themselves, that would be just plain dumb and I'm
going to give him the benefit of the doubt.

I guess he is talking about the various Microsoft supplied frameworks. Within
say, Silverlight, it is easy to dip your toe in, get to something like
databinding, and go off the rails, trying to bend silverlight to your will to
do something that should be easy, and coming away with the impression that
what you are doing is totally impossible within silverlight. Then you spend 20
minutes actually thinking instead of in a Microsoft hate fugue state and you
see that it actually is easy if you don't fight the framework. So you are like
"fuck you .net I want to do it my way!"

But that is the nature of frameworks, not endemic to .net.

------
dman
He should consider switching to a digital tabloid as a writer. He might not be
great at recruiting or how to identify great programmers but he seems to have
a gift for getting his trolling just right.

Some startup here should take him up on the developer vs developer challenge.

------
jimfl
I am a .NET developer, and I am trying to hire excellent, well-rounded .NET
developers (hint), and I can tell you that it is non-trivial, specifically
because many .NET developers are not particularly well-rounded, nor have the
vast majority of them much experience outside the .NET ecosystem, nor more
than a basic understanding of the technologies which underly the very powerful
abstractions MS has built on top of them.

So I can certainly sympathize that someone who is building something that
requires more fundamental knowledge might find .NET to be an effective bunny-
filter.

I did stop reading the article when I got to "I'm sure .NET is a dandy
language."

------
lmkg
Stop

Feeding

The

Troll

------
edoron
I've read much bullshit over the years, but this tops it all. I personally
have wrote code in more than a dozen languages and would still prefer .net
any-day. You can write almost anything with any language. You can develop
web.apps in assembly language if you insist, but it'll take 10 times more time
and money than doing it with .net, php, ror or other modern languages and
you'll have 10 times more bugs to deal with. This attitude is plain stupid
arrogance. If it were a company doing embedded systems for the defense
industry I'd understand, but from a company that deals with invoices... they
must be kidding!

------
MauriceFlanagan
First of all, what flamebait but I'll bite

"Even worse, every day spent learning a Microsoft kitchen takes TWO days to
unlearn, meaning once you get a reasonable way down the .NET career path,
there is almost no going back."

That's not true in my experience.

I work at small, profitable company using Linux / Python / Amazon Web
Services, we have some fantastic developers who came from a pure .NET
background - some worked at Microsoft.

They transitioned successfully because of their attitude. If you commit
yourself to learning the tools and not fighting them, you can make the
transition in a couple months - no problem.

------
joshhart
You're full of it. In what way does .NET hamper you? Why can't you make a
"1.7oz burger"? It's a full-blown programming environment - the limit to what
you build is what your mind can conceive.

------
tzs
Is this guy qualified to talk about hiring programmers? Based on all the
little errors in detail in his blog, I assume he's the non-technical co-
founder of his company, not the technical guy.

------
spoiledtechie
I think this is just a rant by some CEO who hasn't had much real world
experience. Sadly, it doesn't give any examples of why .NET is worse.

I would question why he REALLY doesn't like .NET. This article to me it like a
person stuck inside a box with only peep hole towards the java stack. When he
realizes that there is more to life and academics than just java or objective
C, then maybe we will talk.

Can we please not keep up voting this rant that I didn't learn anything from
except for the comments posted here on HN?

------
coffeenut
It's great that he posted this.

Most of us may not agree with his philosophy, and have questions about his
basic technical and leadership competencies. But right or wrong, he's being
very transparent about their hiring and development philosophies.

This is a good thing. It helps his company attract the kind of person that
will work well in that environment, and gives clear warning to the rest of us
that this is not the place for us, and that we are better of not wasting our
time seeking a career there.

------
gilesc
Although I also dislike .NET, it seems the primary complaint here about .NET
is that it abstracts programmers too much away from the bare metal. But
doesn't that apply equally to non-MS languages like Python and Ruby? In fact,
isn't abstraction in general a good thing?

The author also bewails .NET's lack of configurability. But what is it about
C# that instantly defiles any programmer who touches it, that doesn't also
apply to, say, Java?

------
DotNetPete1
This is a really bad take on Microsoft technology lol.

I've wrapped a lot of my stuff around .NET technology and is very happy with
it. You can definitely save a lot of time and launch your product fast to draw
attracting with .NET. In a B2C business, you need to bring your product to the
market as fast as possible before you can present, the end user doesn't care
what you are built based on. Just take a look at match.com..

------
desigooner
Just because he managed to attain the title of CEO, doesn't mean all he speaks
would be gospel. Having a closed mindset is, more often than not, detrimental
to one's ventures.

------
mcorrientes
wow that sounds really arrogant.

Skills shouldn't be rated by the IDE developer use.

Not everbody wants to be that kind of geek, that's hacking into a console all
day long, rather than using an good IDE.

Rate people by their abilitity to handle those programming languages (e.g.
readability, cleanness, layout, speed and so on).

If you don't need C# developers fine, but don't say people should be aware of
C# programmers.

By the way, I worked with really good developers, which also programmed in C#,
many of them were real experts and absolutly passionated.

------
forgotAgain
I think every developer who reads the article should link to it. That way when
any future employee googles them they will see what an ass they would be
working for.

------
trustfundbaby
If you ever want to work in a startup, avoid .NET. It does you no favors.

\--------------------

Got to love how he extrapolates his own little idiosyncrasy to _every_
startup.

------
rhygar
Maybe the difficulty in hiring good people is because the CEO is clueless?

Any hacker with half a brain would stay far, far away from this company.

------
potthisiskettle
it's like saying real singers, the ones with true talent, the ones that have
sung since they were young and not just voice trained year after year are
rare. Except opera singers - they are truly hacks without the range or talent
to do anything else but belt out high pitched drivel in god awful costumes.

------
jonezy
there's no (well, hardly any) such thing as bad languages, just bad
programmers, managers and business people.

this stuff honestly makes me sad for this industry. There are probably 100's
of programmers that will now never get to work in the start up world because
they list c#/.net etc on there resumes.

------
xentronium
I should probably be ashamed, but I stopped reading after he claimed that .NET
is a language.

~~~
artmageddon
Actually, you shouldn't. I was getting fumed by the end of his first paragraph
where he bragged about his decent programmers being able to fence and do knife
play. If he's looking for mercenaries* who can code I should email him!
Anyway, I read on and he made several contradictions to his own points. I
can't take him seriously now.

*not a mercenary but I'm a runner who flies planes and is a good shot with a Glock, but I sure as hell wouldn't put that on my resume

------
iamjpg
I think it's unfortunate an article like this even gets up-votes on Hacker
News.

------
nlawalker
"Now let me clarify - .NET is a dandy language"

Why I don't listen to CEOs.

------
gersh
Is this site becoming Slashdot? Visual Studio does have some features that can
make you lazy I suppose. ASP.NET web forms does suck, but ASP.NET MVC is good.
Is Java supposed to be better than .NET?

------
alphadog
This is nice linkbait. I will add to my swipefile.

------
pwan
"Kelso, did you ever FINISH Lord of the Flies ?"

------
oleg-d
this is so arrogant..

------
chrisjsmith
I'll bite...

.Net as a framework is designed to get stuff done so you can go home and play
with your kids, not pander to the whims of a CEO with his head up his behind.

According to him, I shall have to "unlearn" all those ever so bad practices
and technologies such as ORM/DDD (NHibernate), DI (Autofac), SoC (MVC), SOLID,
Messaging (NServiceBus), SOA (WCF)...

I will give him one thing; at least 75%+ of the "developers" on the market in
the UK couldn't put a web page together without the ASP.Net webforms designer
but the same is true with all technologies otherwise we wouldn't have
dreamweaver and the likes.

The guy is a total muppet.

------
clistctrl
Fuck this guy, and everything about him. I can program in Assembly, C, C++,
Java, and Lisp fairly competently, but frankly I like C# because I can see
results almost as fast as I can imagine them. It has an amazing tool set. Does
it really make those other programmers better than me because they prefer
needless complexity?

If I need a 1.7oz hamburger, I'll use one of those other tools. But 99% of the
time 1.6oz is just fine.

------
innes
McDonald's has lambdas? Who knew.

