

I’ve Sent This Over 100 Times to Recruiters looking for .Net devs - JeremyMorgan
http://compositecode.com/2014/04/09/ive-officially-sent-this-email-over-100-times-to-recruiters-looking-for-net-developers/

======
edent
I went into a clothes shop the other day, and asked the manager if they had
any red velvet jackets.

"No, but it's funny," said the manager, "you're the 100th person to ask me
that - but I keep telling you people, there's simply no demand for them!"

~~~
lsc
seems like this is a lack of supply, not a lack of demand.

It would be more like walking into the tailor and asking for a red velvet
jacket, and the tailor responding "Wow, you are the tenth customer today
asking me for a red velvet jacket. But, I don't make red velvet jackets,
because I don't have the skills to work with velvet. In fact, I don't know of
any local reputable tailors that are skilled with velvet who are not already
under contract."

"Besides that, I'm an expert, and I think velvet is an inferior materiel. I am
quite skilled with silk, and I could make you an excellent silk jacket. Silk
is far more stylish and functional than velvet, anyhow."

"I know another very skilled leather-worker I could refer you to if you would
like a jacket made of leather, but if you want velvet? I just can't help you"

Fundamentally, I think "I don't like working with technology X" is a
fundamentally reasonable position to take. People have preferences. Sometimes
people are willing to take less money in order to meet those preferences. "I
don't have experience working with technology X" I think is an even more
reasonable position to take.

~~~
Robin_Message
I guess what people are saying is that red velvet is so unfashionable they'd
rather get a job in a factory working green leather day in, day out, than
touch it.

 _Aside: If programming languages were coloured jackets?_

C - black leather, with studs.

C++ - black leather, with studs, on the inside.

Perl - there seem to be fourteen armholes. And seven zips. It's light blue,
but in some places the paint is flaking and many other colours show through.
Oh, and there is no head hole. Its wearers insist it gets things done just
fine and is very flexible. Everyone looks at them weirdly.

Java - a hospital gown. The bare minimum to cover you, mostly designed around
the convenience of others. You can buy a factory to make them, but the
customisations don't seem to make any difference.

Python - A comfortable denim jacket of average size. It is straightforward to
put on. Most people say it fits them perfectly, although a few people say it
chafes.

Ruby - every time you move this jacket, it changes slightly. Putting your arms
into the sleeves causes new sleeves that would fit better to appear underneath
the existing ones. If you tap it, you inexplicable end up with two jackets.

Haskell - a large tartan straitjacket. When you try to put it on, you find
yourself in a new jacket, and the original jacket is still in the wardrobe.
The jackets are connected by an unbreakable thread of modal. When you take it
off, you find yourself looking at yourself still wearing the jacket. You are
connected to your other self by a thread of modal. Allegedly you can do
anything without errors whilst wearing a Haskell jacket; you suspect the
wearers are simply crazy.

Go - A tweed blazer with leather arm patches. It can be split into multiple
_gackets_ , which can be worn by multiple people. When wearing your gacket,
you can communicate with anyone in another of your gackets, but only one of
you can move at once.

C# - part of a family of colourful jackets. The fit well, and are suitable for
all formal occasions. However, they are not available outside the USA. Knock-
offs are available in the rest of the world, but only in shades of grey.

Fortran - a powered exo-skeleton. It is old, slightly rusty, uncomfortable,
unfashionable, and the wrong choice for almost all occasions. However, whilst
wearing it you can run as fast as Usain Bolt.

Javascript - a quite ugly mustard yellow suit jacket. It almost looks like its
been cut out of something else, a sofa possibly. If you put your hand in a
pocket without declaring your intention to do so first, you find other
people's stuff in your pocket, and your stuff gone. They are unreasonably
popular due to a historical quirk in the law that requires you to wear one of
these jackets when visiting a stranger's house.

Lisp - a bolt of woven yak wool, dyed saffron.

Clojure - a bolt of woven yak wool, dyed saffron. It also comes with some
smaller pieces of wool dyed different colours, and a direct phone line to a
hospital. If you read enough tutorials online, you can assemble a comfortable
and useful jacket, although you often have to copy the jacket before you can
modify it.

(many edits as I'm on a roll :-) )

~~~
luser
And to continue....

Smalltalk - the most perfectly made jacket in the entire world but when you
put it on, all your other clothes disappear.

Javascript - A jacket with legholes where the armhole should be, but you wear
it because everyone else is wearing one.

Visual Basic - A jacket made out of bits of old carpet.

Haskell - A highly technically advanced jacket made out of nano particles that
configure themselves to the wearer, but nobody wears them as the instruction
manual is written in Sanskrit.

I disagree with your Perl jacket... a Modern Perl jacket would come with a
magic incantation that when said over the jacket, it turns it into a bad-ass
leather jacket that comes with a free Harley Davidson.

~~~
_puk
JavaScript - more like a jacket with thousands of pockets. Some contain useful
tools, usable by anyone with some experience of DIY. Others, extremely
dangerous tools, many with their safety features disabled, usable only by
qualified builders. There is no manual as to which is which.

CoffeeScript - A T-shirt and tie combo. You started with the intention to look
smart, but got distracted by all the other cool looks you could potentially
carry.

~~~
CmonDev
> JavaScript Half the pockets a full of dung, so you have to use fingers very
> carefully.

> CoffeeScript Also both are bright pink, because why wouldn't you come up
> with your own syntax sugar when you have such an option?

------
andrewstuart
There is nothing quite so laugh out loud hilarious as recruiter baiting on HN.
Recruiters are easy targets, everyone thinks they suck and there's so many
clever ways to point out their cluelessness.

Even now I'm chuckling to myself at how thigh-slappingly hilarious this is and
how it points out that you are a smart developer and recruiters are foolish as
fish.

Magnificent humour and not in the slightest dogmatic, pompous, superior or
neckbeardish. The clever digs at Microsoft oriented developers have certainly
shown you to be one step ahead of them in the cleverness stakes.

Well done sir! I wait with bated breath for the next clever and superior
person on HN to show how much smarter they are than recruiters.

~~~
JeremyMorgan
This is hilarious, but I hope we can get back to real HN submissions. I can't
wait to see the next Something.js that does something jquery already does or
check out a new something.io startup that has an API where you can access all
your APIs.. in one place!

But really another NSA or Heartbleed article would be much better. Hey have
you heard of Heartbleed yet?

------
zamalek
Dear Enterprise/Microsoft Hater 128 345 501,

Do understand that we were simply asking for a developer who understands the
.Net platform; and in no way labeling the developers - heck, it's what they
call themselves!

We appreciate that there is a lot of FUD surrounding various languages but as
we all know FUD is unfounded hatred and hence theoretical; where the conscious
and deliberate action of excluding yourself from an entire market is a literal
limiting action.

We are grateful to hear that your community of contacts have this trend in
terms of development technologies; as most developer communities tend to. You
should meet some of the COBOL folks I hooked up with work, they work once a
month and drive Ferraris - such a pity COBOL is an evil enterprise language;
it's not even cool like Javascript is!

Yours, Scummy Corporate Recruiter 1

~~~
deciplex
Hey if I'm on any of your call lists can you remove me please? Cheers.

~~~
zamalek
I'm not an actual recruiter, was just roleplaying there; at my gig we don't
really need recruiters - in fact we usually have problems with developers that
they send our way (we have been forced to use them a few times to match our
growth). Our best talent comes from word of mouth. I'm not sure they do a good
job (for both the employer and employee) no matter what the language.

I was merely pointing out the irony in the post.

------
ctidd
Your complaint is that you hear about too many opportunities in the "career-
limiting" area of .NET development? No .NET developers are looking for work?
Sounds like anyone wanting to be employed should get familiar with .NET.

Or do you just disagree with the job title having a language in it?

~~~
spamizbad
"Career-limiting" != No Career.

Here in Chicago, .NET jobs pay less than other technologies. A RoR developer
with 4 years of experience probably earns as much as a .NET dev with 8. If
that .NET dev is lucky.

Most of the .NET job listings I get recruiter spammed with are for enterprise
development things from companies whos primary "product" isn't technology. So
if you work for them, you're working in a cost center and will be treated as
such.

Edit: By the way, there's _always_ been a shortage of .NET developers for as
long as I can remember- even going back to '04 and '05 when the industry was
starting to recover. But the salaries always trailed even then. You could make
5-10K more doing Java work in those days. No clue why.

~~~
adron
Yup, exactly. That's another nuance of what I'm hitting at in the blog entry.
This is the case in a lot of big cities with big corp gigs. They're just dead
end gigs. If that's all somebody wants, that's awesome. Learn .NET or Java and
get that shit. But if somebody wants a bit more or a bit of freedom or a bit
of changing scenery, one has to step outside of that. :)

------
valdiorn
Honest question, what do you think is wrong with .NET?

C# is my favorite language and I'm learning F# at the moment, which I think
just as good (but very different). Microsoft have done a shitload to evolve
the platform in the last decade as well.

So why all the sarcastic joking and hate?

~~~
BSousa
Because it is cool to take the piss at .net developers around here! Most
coming from young folks that have only been working on the 'next facebook'
with go/node.js/rails to understand there is a big and very profitable world
out there that runs on more mature stacks/languages.

But hey, doing CAD/Financial Modelling/Insurance/etc software isn't shiny and
something to brag on the next hackathon for hacker cred right?

~~~
guyprovost
That, my friend is well said. Agreed!

------
venomsnake
I love .NET and C# and will gladly write again. I had probably 3-4 years
experience. With one twist - no web stuff. It is awesome for everything else.

------
CmonDev
Short version "Real world, please care about our hipster frameworks that are
using languages older than some enterprise ones. We don't want to use Xamarin
to re-use maximum code while retaining native performance and languages that
don't suck; we don't want to use Unity3d to be able to quickly prototype at
low cost and hight quality. Please pigeon-hole Node.js in every freaking
domain, because everything is an IO throughput problem plus you get to use a
crappy language not just on client side but on server side as well!".

------
pnathan
It would be an interesting 'hack' to put up a set of LinkedIn profiles in,
say, Seattle (where I live), each essentially the same but in the tech stacks
listed: C#, Java, C++, Ruby, PHP, and Haskell. Then, track the recruiter spam
as well as the kind of positions/salaries offered.

I think it would violate LinkedIn TOS to do this, as well as be kind of
douchey to the well-intentioned and hopeful recruiters. So I won't. But
still.... be interesting. :)

~~~
collyw
Its not like recruiters would avoid a reverse situation to get you on their
books by saying there is high paying job looking for your skillset, when there
is not.

------
moondev
> switched from being a .NET Developer to a Software Developer

so brave!

~~~
JeremyMorgan
I think it's a snarky way of saying "someone that decided to take one of the
other 10,000 different options to develop available out there".

I love me some .Net but you'd be silly to ignore the alternatives and many
.Net devs do.

~~~
jader201
I don't ignore the alternatives, but I certainly don't have the time to dive
into every language of the month so that I can add them to my tool belt "just
in case".

And, of course, even if I had them in my tool belt, I don't know too many
companies that will pay what I'm making as a .NET developer to work in a
language I've picked up on the side.

If there's another way, I'd love to hear about it.

~~~
JeremyMorgan
No, it's basically the same route I'm on I put more effort into sharpening my
.Net skills than any other. But if I see something that another technology
will do I try to integrate it just to get familiar (like Node for instance).

The ASP is trying to hard to integrate other stuff into it, and I think few
people deep dive into .Net and Rails, node, etc combined but it's a definite
strength to have some familiarity.

------
bosch
Am I the only one who thinks that sounds pompous?

I can understand maybe being spammed from recruiters, but replying like this
just brings you down to their level. It also makes software devs seem like
jackasses. That would be the case if you were trashing Java or Python or any
other language. I just don't really see the point of replying like this.

------
ksk
People may or may not have good reasons to dislike technologies. I'm sure
people have their reasons for disliking .NET just like they do with Java or
any other technology. From just a generic statement - its hard to know either
way.

I actively dislike all current web app frameworks. The SaaS trend is worrying
IMO because it seems to be the only viable way that startups can make money
these days. I rarely see any startup selling an actual software product.

In my view, you take a rich client application - throw in memory bloat, CPU
bloat, reduce the responsiveness, add in some downtime and you get a webapp.
By the very fact that all web apps are limited by client apps (the browser in
most cases), I don't see any reason to settle for a 'second-class' experience.

------
bowlofpetunias
And people wonder why developers are not being treated like mature
professionals...

This kind of juvenile "OMG, I wouldn't want to be seen dead in such off-brand
sneakers" attitude belongs in a school playground.

Meanwhile there are probably many thousands of .NET devs making a good living
in a nice job with a pleasant (albeit somewhat conventional) work environment
and making enough money to take care of the things that really matter to them
(family, kids). And they couldn't care less about being a cool Node.js or Ruby
developer.

No, you won't run in the them that much. They hang out with the grown-ups.

~~~
louhike
And I am so disappointed to see that on the front page. I'm a young .NET
developper. I will have to find a new job in a few months. I really like
Node.js so I would like to find a job on it but I will never refuse a job just
because it is .NET development.

First, it is a nice technology to work with even if it is linked to prioritary
code.

Second, it is not the technology which makes a job interesting. It has more to
do with the product, the company and the team.

Third, it might a good bet to work on a technology which is not the current
cool kid on the block. .NET is used in a lot of places so we will have a lot
of job offers with few developers. In this context you can manage to get a
nice salary and you won't be treated like meat.

I agree with you we have a problem with this fashion of technologies. But like
you said, and thanks to that, there are still a lot of developpers who do not
fall on this trap.

------
WWLink
You know what, if they are looking for a developer that can hit the ground
running with .NET and make some great stuff, I'm not that guy.

If they're looking to do some .NET projects and want some developers that are
good to pick it up and try it. I'd do that.

How do you get into that situation? Is it even possible? I hear and see the
opposites - companies with absolutely no interest in training, and companies
that love training.

------
PhasmaFelis
I can't quite figure out if this is a genuine and reasonable reply, or if he's
being a pedantic ass. ".NET developer? Oh no no no! I'm just a software
developer who also knows .NET. Please resubmit your offer, replacing all
instances of the phrase '.NET developer' with 'software developer'."

~~~
lugg
I'm erring on the side of pedantic twat. But I'm just a php developer so what
do I know.

------
adron
Seriously Hacker News needs a 'cool comment' button.

