HN user
Graduated in 2008 right in the middle of the mortgage crisis.
It was really bad, but I was fresh out of college and had no experience.
Took me about 10 months to find a job in that market.
The market is definitely rough, but I wouldn’t say it’s that bad yet.
This was (is) me.
Love Rails, but found it very difficult to learn Ruby. It's very hard for me to read, but that may be because I come from a C# background.
If you're looking for something like Rails, I'd recommend trying out Laravel.
It's on par with Rails as far as features, ease of use, etc. And PHP was a lot easier to learn for me versus Ruby.
I would say F# is as popular as it’s ever been.
C# is still king, but it’s been getting a few features from F# the past few years.
I thought this too before I bought it, but figured “what the hell” and bought it anyway.
I haven’t played the first one, but the second one is excellent and is my favorite game of the year so far, and probably last year too. And as already mentioned, it plays great on the Steam Deck.
I highly recommend it.
This has been my experience too.
It's either what you mentioned or they have very outdated development practices.
In no way was my intention to brag. I'm pretty sure it wasn't the parent commenter's intention either. Just people reflecting and commenting on their experiences on this topic.
I'll keep in mind how comments like that come off in the future.
This has been my exact experience too. Wife and I...no trouble conceiving.
Friends in late 20's to early 30's have had a lot of trouble conceiving, i.e. they needed to do IVF.
Not sure what's going on with that, and this is purely anecdotal, but I've been hearing people having troubles having kids a lot it seems.
This was exactly me and few months ago and is also how I burned out at my last job. You can add all the front-end stuff to that list too.
I think it’s easy to say we as engineers should make things simpler. I have no idea how to do that in practice on a team though.
Once the complexity started to creep in, seems like a wave just kept sweeping everyone towards more and more complexity.
I feel the same way and can understand where the original comment is coming from. To your point, I also think I’ve reached the ceiling too salary wise.
Was talking to a recruiter who specializes in recruiting for tech and product companies. The C# positions he had topped out at what other languages started at for senior developers.
I like C# it’s just it feels like it’s all enterprise jobs with bad development practices.
Yup, fully aware.
Should’ve said “Heroku-like” instead of “Heroku for AWS”.
Reading this made me sad. I’ve wondered for a long time why no one ever bothered to build a Heroku for AWS.
My main complaint as an application developer these last few years is the amount of time I’ve had to spend wrangling infrastructure.
What did you end up moving to and how did you do it?
I’ve been noticing what you’ve posted for awhile in regards to interesting opportunities and .NET, or lack there of.
Not sure how to make the switch to something else though.
Oh, I agree with you. It absolutely comes down to the organization.
And like you said the organizations that pay very well...don't tend to use .NET. Which is what I've been seeing "in the wild".
At this point, it's just becoming increasingly hard to justify sticking with it. Especially considering I could make more money and not have to deal with so much legacy or poor development practices all the time.
In defense of those organizations though, in my experience, the interview processes have been very reasonable, i.e. no LeetCode. As long as you haven't been sleep walking through your career, it should be pretty easy to get a new position.
I feel seen with this comment and I'm glad I'm not the only one that has been feeling this way.
I'm about to start a new position that uses C#/.NET and seems like a technically mature/sophisticated organization. Finding this position was hard though.
If that fell through, I was thinking of ways I could try to switch tech stacks. As you stated, the types of companies that gravitate towards .NET are not the types of companies I want to work for anymore.
Not to mention, after talking to several recruiters, it seems like salary for .NET devs are much lower than counterparts in other languages. I'm probably at the top of what I can expect to make as a senior engineer in .NET. I spoke to a few recruiters who recruit for other stacks and my salary is what senior devs typically start at for those organizations.
As someone who programs with .NET in their day job...no probably, not.
Outside of a few areas related to DDD, event sourcing, and some distributed-system frameworks (NServiceBus and MassTransit) there's really no killer app for .NET, in my opinion.
The big selling point for .NET now is that it runs on Linux...which is not really a selling point in the grand scheme of things.
I think it's the familiarity factor.
It's pretty close to the way you'd work with C#/Java. If you were coming from that type of background, it's an easier transition.
A plus, and also a minus, of Angular is that it's pretty "self-contained". There's first party tools built-in, that are maintained by Angular. You also don't have to endlessly tweak Webpack which is also a plus.
That self-containment has also led to a less vibrant ecosystem in my opinion. There's more React "stuff" out there than for Angular.
Also, if you're the "mythz" I think you are, just want to say I'm a big fan of ServiceStack and you do great work on it.
Just wish I could work somewhere that uses it instead of primarily working with it on my personal projects. Given how the .NET community "works" though, I fear that might not happen. Conversation for another thread though. Kudos again.
My first two programming jobs out of college back in the early 2010's took the approach in this article. Albeit, with older technology.
This is bringing back old (bad) memories of the times where I was debugging stored procedures that called triggers that called the same stored procedures.
A lot of that was due to poor design and bad choices. Some of that was due to developers trying to fit processes and patterns into a language, i.e. SQL, that lacked the expressiveness for it.
I'm not a fan of this approach to say the least.
I'd be interested in hearing other's experiences with this though.
And I'm going to check out Fauna since it looks like a cool database and to see if anything has changed with this approach since I encountered it almost a decade ago.
Bought your book awhile ago from someone that mentioned it on my Twitter feed.
I’m really enjoying it! You did a great job on it.
I especially liked the chapter on networking since it was always something I was weak in.
Why do you think that is? In regards to Cloud Foundry being steamrolled by Kubernetes.
There's not a day that goes by where I'm using the "current stack", i.e. K8S, Terraform, etc., and not wish I was using Heroku or something Heroku-like instead.
I had to reply to this because I’ve been feeling this very heavily the last few years. Not sure what to do about it either because it feels like it’s everywhere.
Specifically “Agile”, the lack of autonomy, and the standup confessional.
I can appreciate communicating and keeping everyone on the same page. At some point though, we’re going to have to realize we’re all professionals and we can trust people to do their jobs.
I haven’t worked at a FAANG or any other company even close to that level of scale, so you can take me with half a grain of salt too.
But what you said is absolutely true. It’s also something you will very much experience once you start working professionally.
I’m in no position to give you advice, and I think I might be giving advice to myself...just don’t let it get to you.
Austin.
And this is coming from someone who has lived in Houston for 20 years.
Cuisine is often touted as one of the best things about Houston, and it is good, no doubt. We have quality and variety. It's also very cheap to live here compared to other places.
And that's pretty much it as far as pluses as far as I'm concerned.
The job market tends to be good overall, but I would say the jobs are not as good, at least as far as technology. This is mostly "Line of Business" land, and while there's nothing wrong with that, you'll often find technology companies here who are still stuck in the old ways of making and delivering software.
Oil and gas rules here and everything tends to be centered around that. The list of companies here doing what most of us would consider to be interesting work is rare. Also, you're going to be hard pressed to find anything that isn't centered around Java and/or .NET, so be aware of that.
And while real estate is cheap, it really depends on where you live. You MUST have a car to live in Houston. You also may find yourself commuting 45+ minutes each way if you aren't careful and don't have a remote job.
Oh, and the weather here SUCKS.
With that being said, I'm sure there's worse places to live.
Not a super big impact professionally. Creating and maintaining distributed systems is hard. And even harder when business requirements, stakeholders, etc. get involved.
One major take away I got from the course is to limit the more RPC-driven services I typically saw up to that point (and still see in current microservices examples to this day).
He also gave a lecture on the different types of coupling, which I had never even heard of prior to the course.
He also has a few talks on YouTube as well as others that work at Particular Software. I'd highly recommend checking out all of them.
Thanks!
I've been reading/lurking on this site for YEARS.
For some reason though, the idea of posting has been nerve-rattling even though everyone is technically anonymous.
Udi Dahan's "Learn Advanced Distributed Systems Design" course.
At one point, I was considering paying out of pocket to attend the course. Fortunately, the company I was working for at the time wanted to send people to it and I got selected.
After taking the course, even if I did have to pay myself, I wouldn't have been upset.
That course is outstanding.