I'll tell you why I won't choose it as a solo dev.
Back when I was still young and impressionable, I had several frustrating experiences with it at university. Most due to my inexperience, a few times due to Windows being Windows. Also, back then the various $$ and time costs. IIRC $125+ for a windows DVD, $150+ for a VS.Net install DVD, and higher hosting prices for Windows. Also, installs and updates OS, .NET, etc were frequent and time consuming. When I'm making $2.50/hr + tips to get by I couldn't afford that kinda investment.
Now, most of my career has been using Linux, and a variety of interpreted languages. I'm comfortable with them. I boot my Windows partition maybe 2 times a year. There would be a huge cost for me to completely transition to .NET.
In order to get me to try it now would require you to show me some set of features that make it a much better choice than what I currently know. For example, if I someday choose to do Windows apps.
I disagree with this, but I understand where it's coming from. I think you have a form of whiplash from things like:
- Novices overusing the new shiny.
- Java/C++/etc Jr programmers overusing design patterns.
- Perl programmers solving everything with regexes.
- Small startups with GraphQL, or any other large enterprise tool.
- Metaprogramming, Maco's, Dependency injection, Recursion, etc when a simpler solution is a better fit.
IMHO, a "best codebase" will be just a bit more advanced than I am, with good resources for me to grok it. I want to be able to learn from it. I also don't want to be so far out of my depth that I can't make a reasonable contribution.
I work with a client that has us ssh in. We are committing on branches, and they are linked to testing subdomains. So there is some safety. In theory you can spin up a local copy. Almost no one does it. Between the micro services, needing to copy multiple SQL schemas, and seed it with test data, there are a lot of hurdles with little reward.
For my personal sites, one is just a scp, into a subdir. If everything looks good, I just mv it to overwrite live. The other I just restart the process. There's nothing "mission critical" on it.
Around 2010 the company I worked for had a pay freeze. Most employees worked in the office, but about 1/4 worked remote. About three years later the freeze was lifted. The in office employees were notified about said policy change and got raises shortly thereafter. Us remote employees didn't know about the change until almost 2 years later. After an in office employee mentioned it to one of us.
When we brought it up to management they were apologetic, and said they forgot. I work for a small company that wasn't particularly organized so it's possible they forgot but still. :(
TL;DR; If you take the pay cut, check in every few months with both management and others at your level.
Stop giving your employer free labor. It sounds like you're on your way to burnout, and your misplacing some of your frustration onto the Jr devs.
Let me ask you this: What $$ will the current level of work be acceptable? My guess is that it's well above what your employer is willing to pay.
I'd suggest you do what your Jr peels do + 10%, that'll fulfill the requirement for bump & bonus. Also spend some time building relationships. If your manager mentions you no longer doing XYZ, show off your +10%. Politely and tactfully deflect if he tries to press the issue.
To answer your fairness question directly the system sounds inefficient and currently not fair. I think it could be fair(for whatever that means), given the right environment, and attitudes.
My kids came with manuals. Every new baby in Taiwan does. We also got a manual for the pregnancy. Very useful.
I know that one of the public health orgs in Australia has something similar. You should be able to google for it. It was a mostly no nonsense PDF with bullet points outlining the what and when, divided by an age range the milestone expected to happen during.
Plenty of us coded before SO, but I think you're being too general. Using SO to see examples of syntax is completely different than copying a chunk/function/page of original code someone wrote to solve a problem.
While I agree businesses have to mitigate against bots and hacking, I'd like to push back a bit. I'm an American living abroad. I have the same types of issues as OP, even with my reliable internet. The current methods of mitigation vary from annoying to outright discriminatory.
One example is that my home state's IRS portal(along with all the other state gov sites) straight up block access from the overseas democracy I live in. I assume they block almost all overseas access but I haven't tried to verify it. Like OP, I need to use a SOCKS proxy, or VPN to bypass this heavy handed tactic. While I'd love for it to not be so, Americans living abroad still have to file their taxes. An NPR article said there's probably close to 5 million of us expats.
Lastly with the Cloud VMs, it doesn't seem that this sort of ban is evenly distributed. I've proxied/tunneled through Linode, a well known Torrent VPN, and Digital Ocean, without raising any red flags, but Amazon, ViperVPN, and NordVPN have been flagged. I could go on and argue that with the learn to code movement I could see a cloud instance being the new geocities homepage, but that may never come to pass.
Some of the comments below are talking about how to successfully argue against the move. Does your company have some history you can point out? We've had enough of these type guys and their failed space ship projects that any proposal for a language shift, or major framework adoption is viewed with skepticism first.
We've dealt with "new guy wants to overhaul ..." scenario. When I joined this company we were a C++ shop with some Perl and bash. Multiple new recruits successfully lobbied to implement refactors, or new projects in a hot language/framework. Several of the refactors were a huge waste of resources that either didn't come to fruition, or were only partially successful.
Now, we are a Perl shop with active development in 3 other languages(not counting front end), and we're maintaining legacy apps in an additional 4 languages. And we've deprecated apps in at least 3 additional languages.
I guess I should be thankful none of them have lobbied for switching databases. :-O On any given year, we average 3-4 programmers and 2-4 contractors(mostly front end) Two of us have been there 15+ years, but the other full timers seem to move on around the three year mark. Because of that all the hot shots have left. When a major bug is discovered in their code it can take a long time to fix, and any breakage due to upgrades is quite a hassle since those of us left aren't experts at every language we have to maintain.
> Also, what's up with people asking this question in the first conversation?
At least here in the USA, there's a lot of advice about deflecting that question. Things like, countering with "What are your pay ranges?", or "Let's wait to negotiate the salary until we're sure we're a good fit." and so on.
I believe the common reasoning that they ask early is to cut out overpriced developers. When a company gets lots of applicants this probably makes sense to them. I think generally, if you're a good fit they'll go a little above their max pay to try and bring you in.
Back when I was still young and impressionable, I had several frustrating experiences with it at university. Most due to my inexperience, a few times due to Windows being Windows. Also, back then the various $$ and time costs. IIRC $125+ for a windows DVD, $150+ for a VS.Net install DVD, and higher hosting prices for Windows. Also, installs and updates OS, .NET, etc were frequent and time consuming. When I'm making $2.50/hr + tips to get by I couldn't afford that kinda investment.
Now, most of my career has been using Linux, and a variety of interpreted languages. I'm comfortable with them. I boot my Windows partition maybe 2 times a year. There would be a huge cost for me to completely transition to .NET.
In order to get me to try it now would require you to show me some set of features that make it a much better choice than what I currently know. For example, if I someday choose to do Windows apps.
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