.Net Programmers Fall in CNN's Top 5 In-Demand 602
GT_Alias writes "CNN Money is reporting that .Net programmers are one of the top 5 most in-demand jobs. Of the positions where recent surveys have indicated a labor shortage, .Net developers and QA analysts are the two that fell under the 'technology' category. According to CNN Money, .Net developers can make between $75-85K starting out in major cities, with the potential to make 15% more if they have a particular proficiency. Additionally, QA workers can make $65-75K a year with the ability to negotiate a 10-15% pay jump if they switch jobs. How does this information compare with the Slashdot crowd's real-world experience?"
Large groups of employers (Score:3, Insightful)
Why isn't something that's more portable (perl/python) in such demand? Really bakes my noodle.
Re:Kill me...kill me please. (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyway, just because it's easy to learn doesn't necessarily mean that it's a bad programming language. It just means that it's an easy to learn one.
Re:Kill me...kill me please. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, but sooner or later it means that there are a bunch of colleges churning out people who've become "experts" having taken a 6 week course in the language with no prior IT experience.
Doesn't take long for it to become apparent that so many people who claim to know the platform are inexperienced fools. Once that happens, salaries drop.
Re:Large groups of employers (Score:4, Insightful)
Because .NET is the major development platform of the major operating system.
Neither perl nor python are very popular for large application development, even on unix. So there isn't much demand.
Better: be wide-minded (Score:5, Insightful)
In the long way, you'll have to switch between many OS, compilers, languages, etc. Sometimes you have to be pragmatic, just to pay the bills, but take conscience about that the IT field is very variable in the surface, but sound in the fundamentals. This is why I recommend generic Computer Science formation when young people ask me for an advice (plus some other "last wave" preparation, just in case).
Re:Kill me...kill me please. (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore, just because C/C++ is a "faster" language, that doesn't imply its better suited to web development, or even windows app development. A strongly typed language with a predefined API like the
Now, this is the same argument as most people with common sense make with Java -- no on says its the right tool for every job, but it certainly can be the right tool for a lot of jobs. The same with C++. Do you really think we ought to code our web apps in C/C++? IF so, then why not just go all out and do it in assembly?
Why .Net? (Score:5, Insightful)
Java gives you choice. Choice of IDE, choice of framework, choice of application server and perhaps most importantly choice of platform. All that and it runs as fast as
So is it any wonder that there are less
Re:Why .Net? (Score:4, Insightful)
So is it any wonder that there are less .Net developers.
More likely the story is that the old Windows developers are clinging to VC++ and VB instead of making the transition to the new .NET languages. Many of these .NET jobs are probably converting legacy Windows apps to the .NET platform. You can't just throw away a codebase worth years of labor and start over with Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, or some other buzzword compliant flavor of the month.
I know we have to deal with this transition at work, so probably many others will have to, too.
Re:I'm Job Searching (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of you are missing the point... (Score:1, Insightful)
By background i mean 3 thiered knowledge, application life cycles..etc
and have a few large corporate project behind you.
Don't think for an instant you will get those amount of dollars for just
knowing VB,C#,ASP.net
Same applies to any language btw.
My advice is this, start small, get good projects that has the potential to be completed behind you and build up on that, your position will evolve naturally into corporate type programing in no time!
Re:Large groups of employers (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever try and write an enterprise level application, even a web application, in perl? It's great for small internal applications; that CPAN doo-hickey works just great.
But CPAN bites you back when you hit the limits of what those modules can do in a large-scale application. When you hit the limit of what is the easiest and arguably the best (and arguably not) ORM out there, Class::DBI, there's 150 different, incompatible modules out there to do what you want. Which one will be maintained? Which one silently overwrites methods deep within more established modules and doesn't tell you? Want one that adds support for limit and sort by? One module gives you that easily, but not with the same interface as the other 10 that are more full featured. Which do you choose?
Don't even get me started on trying to send an email with Perl. CPAN seems to have a new module for sending email every other day. It's become less of a one-stop shop for the modules you need and more of the perl newbie ftp drop site for modules no one could possibly need or want.
As an example, check out what's been uploaded today. Version 0.02 of JavaScript::MochiKit, helpfully described as 'makes perl suck less', with 15 classes and less than a page of documentation. Great! Just what I was looking for!
There's also a module for interacting with MySpace, two versions in the same day of of an XML parser (writer? who knows, I didn't read it) for a data format used by the library of congress (from the same proud author of version 0.3 of Acme::Voodoo, described as 'Do bad stuff to your objects'), version 0.18 (version 0.17 was yesterday's) of DBIX::Class::Loader, a copycat of Class::DBI::Loader for this self-proclaimed CDBI replacement (which is probably needed, but god help a perl newbie who shows up on CPAN looking for ORM nowadays). It's 2pm my time (Austria), meaning it's 5:30 central time, and there are already 9 modules with version numbers less than 1.0 uploaded to CPAN.
Now don't get me wrong, this is fantastic for a small scale app. I'm sure someone will get some use out of a MySpace profile accessor in perl. But what makes CPAN, and perl, great for small-time stuff makes it just terrible for enterprise applications.
As for perl's portability...do you really expect to make an argument that a language that is, in quite official terms, defined by the official compiler is portable? Perl runs on windows, but since perl.exe IS the language, differences between it and the unix versions aren't even technically bugs...they just ARE! It's not a proper way to 'run a language', so to speak.
I've been programming in perl for years. I get paid well for it. I don't plan to stop using it for my insignificant applications. But I know damn well why it's not in demand.
nobody
Re:.NET? Who cares? (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember COM+, ActiveX, etc.? Every 3-4 years Microsoft comes out with their latest interfaces, buzzwords, etc. In a few years MS will be moving from Visual Fred to Visual Jake, and everybody will be doing backflips to migrate their legacy code.
Is it time to retire some of those COBOL/CSIS mainframes? Sure.
Do we need to rewrite every application we own just because it is more than three years old? No...
A lot of shops still have VB6 sitting around because of the large number of difficult-to-port applications. How many people have GCC v2 lying around for hard-to-compile C apps? Almost none, since the GNU folks are half-decent about backwards compatibility in their development tools. When things break it tends to be minor - as it should be for a programming language.
The bottom line is that programmers shouldn't have to jump through hoops every time MS wants to sell more development stuido licenses, or needs to attract media attention...
Web RAD (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'm Job Searching (Score:5, Insightful)
Meh. Shame has nothing to do with it. Feeding 3 kids, paying down a mortgage and putting gas in my Saturns has much more influence over me than your philosophical bullcrap. Shame... What Ever.
Final analysis: code is code is code. If coding for OSS projects floats your boat, then do so, Its a free world. I use Debian too, just not @ work.
BN, MCAD
Cheers, my man
Re:I'm Job Searching (Score:3, Insightful)
While you should learn this, you should also be gaining experience in java/C/C++, php, ruby, maybe some cobol and VB, and on several platforms particularly, Windows, *nix (apple and linux are the most used *nix, but solaris is big in some companies and you can also download for free).
Personally, I woudl try to judge the market and ask what will be hot in about a year, not what is hot NOW!. Then shoot for that market. For me, back in the mid 80's, I did trs-80 in a lab as well as mainframe/dos/apple, then in late 80's, I started down the path of network coding on Unix, moved on perl/web development in the early 90's (with the real jobs of working at IBM Watson(OS2/AIX), HP(HP-UX), Bell labs(Windows/SunOS) and USWest (mainframe, apple, HP)), started Linux coding in 93 with jobs in 94 through 97, teaching for the next few years (working on start-ups doing wifi), now contracting to move stuff from WIndows to Linux (lots of calls for that).
Make the right call, and you have plenty of work. Make the wrong call, and you are unemployable.
Re:Why .Net? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Kill me...kill me please. (Score:5, Insightful)
Rule number 1) gain a solid understanding of computer, programming, design, network fundimentals. I doesn't matter if its Linux/Windows, Java/C++/.NET, etc, etc.
Once you have this solid foundation to build on then decide what industry segment you'd enjoy working in and learn that business segment inside and out.
I know as techies we often don't like dealing with getting our selfs "dirty" dealing with the business, we just like the tech but that will lead to a frustrating career in my opinion. Programming is becoming easier and easier, there is getting to be less and less value in being able to program any certain langauge, you can spend you entire life jumping between industries chasing the a few extra bucks in the lastest langauge or become an expert in an industry (where the real money is). When I'm looking to hire someone I couldn't care less what languages they know! As long as they are decent programmer its easy to teach them a new langange. Whats much more difficult is teaching them the fine points of our industry. So be it finance, retail, manufacturing, gaming, ect, etc. I think knowing a busniess well is much more important than what langauge you know.
Re:Large groups of employers (Score:3, Insightful)
Perl -- Had a shot at commercial app dev relevance in the 90s, but the world passed it by, and is used rarely for new projects. Largely relegated to Unix system scripts, which is more of what it was designed for.
Python -- Just because some college student coded a filesharing app with it doesn't make it a popular language. Nothing against the language, just that you probably won't find a job using it.
IIS -- it's actually a very popular web application server, but very few of those installations would show up in Netcraft surveys because they aren't Internet-accessible. Judging by the job market it's much more likely you will be "working" (that is, getting paid) on IIS or even Tomcat rather than Apache httpd.
Re:Large groups of employers (Score:1, Insightful)
All they want is a file server and email. So they spend 5k on a server and 3k on the software and some licenses for their 10 computer company and *all* they want is shared drives and email. Literally.
So I come in, clean up their Windows install. Configure their machines. Make things work.
Could be done with Linux and free software for
But hey, Windows is great for my wallet.
Re:Yes! They're Right! (Score:5, Insightful)
For years, one could blame Microsoft for cheap amateur hack coding. No more -- Open Source "LAMP" now totally owns that market.
Re:I'm Job Searching (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:WHY?? (Score:3, Insightful)
I use .net (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Large groups of employers (Score:3, Insightful)
Heh. This sums up so much about posts on development languages on Slashdot.
Re:Large groups of employers (Score:2, Insightful)
framework standardization (Score:3, Insightful)
Keep in mind that the writer of this (Score:2, Insightful)
These writers don't know anything.
Re:Supply and demand (Score:3, Insightful)
We made a bad call, but that certainly doesn't let him off the hook.
Re:Wow, wish I made that much... (Score:4, Insightful)
The shootings... I am not exactly sure what you mean by this. People do get shot yes.. but it is not like we all run around in fear of being shot. Statistically it is one of the least likely ways for you to die. Heart disease is much worse over here.
I am no apologist, but please pick on us for stuff that is actually bad like our idiot politicians that are bankrupting the country and such.
Jeremy
Re:Large groups of employers (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Large groups of employers (Score:2, Insightful)
QA is not testing, testing is not QA (Score:5, Insightful)
(Sorry, I'm not going to summarize a couple of decades of SWEng experience for Slashdot, just do more reading on the subject.)
And Tomorrow... (Score:5, Insightful)
The real skill that a programmer needs if he or she is going to make it is adaptability. Stop thinking in terms of languages, period. At the core, unless you're having to do some pretty wild coding, most work pretty much the same. Think in terms of projects. If you're a freelancer, you'll want to have your finger in lots of pies, and if you're an in-house programmer, well, you know, the boss man is going to tell you what you're coding in. Flex the conceptual skills, because last week it was Delphi and VB, yesterday it was Java, today it's .Net, tomorrow it will be Ruby, and who the hell knows what next week will bring.
Like it or not, the programmer is just as much a slave to consumerism as anyone else, though it comes from a different angle. Managers and customers are sold platforms and languages by marketing guys (you know, the kinds of guys that get these sorts of articles planted in CNN), and you're going to have to adapt. It's really sucky, but that's the nature of the game. It's not like the olden days where a guy could learn Cobol and have a job until he dropped dead into the card reader.
Re:Why .Net? (Score:5, Insightful)
It can't be because CLR is faster than the JVM, it isn't.
The performance of the two runtimes are comparable. Neither kicks the other's butt. Like all things, you can find a benchmark that proves one is better than the other. At the end of the day, the apps that both Java and
as soon as you start to push its framework (as all real applications do) the
I would beg to disagree with this statement. Personal experience has dictated the exact opposite. But, it would help if you provided an area where you feel
Java gives you choice. Choice of IDE, choice of framework, choice of application server and perhaps most importantly choice of platform.
All that choice, as someone else pointed out, can be confusing. If you're building an application for an enterprise system you want to know what will get the job done. Not only that, but you want to know that it will be supported in a meaningful way down the road. The fact that Java has hundreds of frameworks (most of which duplicate functionality of other previously written frameworks) is actually a disservice. It's the old "jack of all trades, master of none", but applied to frameworks. The frameworks also mimic the fashion/pop culture than being technical solutions. This week it's struts, next week velocity, the following week some other framework. Enterprise solutions prefer solid choices, not the fad of the week.
You could make the argument that if the framework is open source, then you are guarranteed to have the framework down the road. But, that involves getting into the code and supporting the codebase. If it's critical to the company's environment they will do that regardless. In fact, likely the would have written/extended most of it themselves. The thing is that most of these frameworks are *not* critical in the "it gives us a market edge" sort of way. It doesn't make business sense to drain limited resources by supporting a toolset that turned out to be a fad and not properly supported down the road.
and expect to move over to Ruby on Rails (or whatever is flavor of the month) in 5 to 10 years
And that, dear
Despite what most
Re:Large groups of employers (Score:4, Insightful)
This is exactly why
This attitude is exactly why the perl culture is not going mainstream. This is the attitude of someone who refuses to work with a team that hasn't forced him to respect them. This is how primadonnas think, and not the way the people who have those
This misses the point of my original post. I never said I couldn't find a tool to send an email. I said that CPAN is a clearinghouse for unfinished, in development, and first-time libraries. Net::SMTP does in fact work rather well. I've used it. But, say I were showing up to CPAN the first time. A search for 'Send Email' (most people are thinking about emails, not SMTP), brings me to Email::Send, Email::Send::Sendmail, Email::Send::NNTP (this doesn't make much sense), Email::Send::Qmail, Log::Dispatch::Email, Test::Nightly::Email, Mail::Spool, Mail::Sender, Mail::Sendmail, Mail::Send, Mail::SendEasy, and there are even more. This is ridiculous; it would be impossible to make a business justification for choosing one over the other.
Compare this to the MFC, which, while not NEARLY as extensive as CPAN, is MUCH better documented, is standardized, and it's a safe bet.
Why not just use the MFC and write your own, if you have to pay attention to the guts of the library code? A business wants to be able to say: we can be SURE of our library code, and we wrote everything else ourselves.
I'm not trying to say it's better or worse, the whole perl culture thing. It can be quite good, actually, and I think other language communities should take a hint from perl in some areas, especially some of those libraries which arose out of the system I am so quick to disparage. There should be something as good as DateManip in every standard library, and Date::Simple lets one use dates almost as easily as a primitive, which makes life SO much goddamn easier, to be frank. I understand that perl has definite advantages.
But that is just not what a business is looking for. Both of the parent posts to this smack to me of elitism. That perl is better than some other language for some reason. It's not the language. It's the culture surrounding it. It is, no offense, people like yall who think that management is stupid for going with the trend. Software is a means to an and, and not a means unto itself. The tools for creating a tool, by and large, should not be out of the ordinary.
nobody
It's getting hard to troll like that. (Score:3, Insightful)
It has been used since the early days of the Web to write CGI scripts, and is an integral component of the popular LAMP (Linux / Apache / MySQL / (Perl / PHP / Python)) platform for web development. Perl has been called "the glue that holds the web together". Large projects written in Perl include Slash, early implementations of PHP [1], and UseModWiki, the wiki software used in Wikipedia until 2002. ... New features have been added, yet virtually complete backwards compatibility with earlier versions is maintained. [wikipedia.org]
So, if Perl is good enough to manage Slashdot and Wiki, I imagine it's good enough to manage any "enterprise" site and is very much worth knowing.
People are indeed hiring people who know perl. There might not be a spike in demand like there is in the non free world, where all the "partners" move lock step, but the jobs are there. I like the way Wall put it, "What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the sound of a wall that people have stopped banging their heads against?" Companies that don't mind spending lots of money will continue to persue .NET, C#, M$whatever, and crack lots of heads doing it.
Re:Kill me...kill me please. (Score:2, Insightful)
However, nor would I say that the implied corrolary, that C# is better suited to web development work, is true. Overhead on C# work in the web development sphere is in fact actually driving a lot of companies who HAD gone to ASP.NET to switch over to *nix/Ruby or Python.
Finally a general note - as someone authorized to hire programmers, I generally look for breadth of experience in a number of different languages and backgrounds. I KNOW that these people can learn
OOP != OOP (Score:4, Insightful)
In fact, I'd say the first two years after graduation I was a pretty crappy developer. I didn't know it of course, but later it has really hit me.
Re:Large groups of employers (Score:3, Insightful)
A sure sign of quality.
Re:Better: be wide-minded (Score:3, Insightful)
And spend the day cleaning out other people's shit? I don't think so. Not to mention that the pay is NOT as good as programming, and programming skills can be leveraged into better jobs. I did a career chance from another engineering field into programming - after 3 years of coding I am now a JOAT leading both a development team and a research team.
of
In 10 years all the programming jobs will be outsourced to India/China
Not hardly. Outsourcing is slowing down.
The safe rule: get a great education, heavy on the math, develop your writing skills and the world is your oyster. Even though I never had a formal course in computer science I can solve problems none of the computer science people I work with can touch because of the math I can do.
Math is the universal key.
Re:They don't know what .NET is (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing learned while programming is non-portable. The basic concepts of programming, as well as everything built on those concpts, are the same in any language.
Re:I'm Job Searching (Score:3, Insightful)
It's my personal opinion is that the mentality a successful programming career requires is something you almost have to be born with. You need to not only excel at solving complex problems on your own, but must enjoy it. There are plenty of very smart people (smarter than me) who can't put together a simple app - they just don't have the patience.
You're reading slashdot - that's a good sign. But I'd be suspicious of someone trying to enter the field who hadn't picked up some skills on their own, as a hobby. I bought my first computer in 8th grade (1983) and spent much of my high school years making games on it. I wrote an adventure game on my HP calculator. This may sound ridiculous but I'll bet a lot of people reading this have similar stories. Most of the programmers I know are basically introverted - not in any extreme way, they just function well on their own. Someone with a very outgoing personality, a "people person", would probably do better in another field. For someone who's intelligent and ambitious, there are plenty of jobs that pay better than programmer.
That said, if you're confident that you should be a programmer, I'd say learning
Unless you have a CS degree, your
Good Luck
Re:I'd say thats about right (Score:3, Insightful)
The ideal QA person is one who actually enjoys breaking stuff, and will hone his or her skills at it for years to come. One who already wants to migrate to development can have the wrong frame of mind (as to what their job should be), as well as conflicts of interest (don't piss off the development manager). I say this as a developer who has great respect for good, professional QA people.
C/C++ (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Large groups of employers (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you kidding?
Besides for Microsoft shops (relatively new development), most of the industry (any company with IT department older than 20 years) uses UNIX (and a fair bit of Perl/shell/C) for their core business. I'm not talking about employee computers (all those are Windwos), but servers, databases, etc., stuff that folks actually maintain/write code for.
When I hear of a corp using MS SQL Server and MS software for everything, that basically tells me that they've only been using IT in their business for the last 5-7 years. (again, I'm not talking about employee computers).
My experience in NYC financial (Score:3, Insightful)
We have high demand for "expert"
We do find plenty of Java developers with enterprise experience and from rich software engineering experience. We've hired Java developers for
So, for my company at least, we have high demand for "expert"
My company's experience might be unique considering we are in NYC, and many of the Java folks we interview are from large financials.