Expensify CEO On 'Why We Won't Hire .NET Developers'
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TheGrapeApe writes "The CEO of San Francisco-based, VC-backed startup Expensify wrote a post on the company's blog about why he considers .NET experience on a resume a general liability, saying that it will 'definitely raise questions' when screening for developers in his shop. Quoting: '.NET is a dandy language. It's modern, it's fancy, it's got all the bells and whistles. And if you're doing Windows Mobile 7 apps (which the stats suggest you aren't), it's your only choice. But choosing .NET is a choice, and whenever anybody does it, I can't help but ask "why?"' Does he have a point? Or is it counterproductive to screen devs out based on what platforms or languages they have used in the past?"
Re:Money (Score:5, Interesting)
I've done C, C++, Java, and half a dozen other languages in my development life.
While I loathe ASP.NET, I really like C# ... better than I like Java in fact. The Visual Studio development environment (with ReSharper added on) is really nice (though it's no IntelliJ IDEA). And I make a good living doing C# development.
To judge me negatively for this choice seems... odd. Prejudicial. Baseless.
I can understand if it was VB all the way, but come on.
Re:Money (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. A lot of jobs, and most of my C++ skills/knowledge transfer well.
This article is one of the stupidest things I've read in a while.
"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. However, if you need to make a 1.7 oz burger, you simply can’t."
I assume by this, he means there's something you can't do in it, because all of the shit is built in. Well, I guess .NET isn't the ONLY solution to EVERY possible problem. Who would have known? Besides that, it's a pretty good solution, to many problems.
"Instead, we look for a very different sort of person. The sort of person who grew up cooking squirrels over a campfire with sharpened sticks"
Awesome. I never want to work for you. I've got several friends, and they're good friends, but they're retards. They are C purists, and like to write everything in more low level languages because it's "leet". They have lots of knowledge about C, understand some amazingly complex concepts, but get them to implement something simple, and they're going to write everything from scratch. Why? Because that's the kind of person who isn't used to using all this other code. Isn't used to finding other libraries, or just re-using someone else's code.
If they see .NET as bad on a resume, especially if that was on a resume from when the person worked at a reasonably large enterprise, and even more so if that was a windows environment, then they're retarded. If I saw a lack of it, especially when developing small applications, I'd be looking further at their work, to see if they really make smart decisions on the best language to use for the given solution.
I'd say startups don't use .NET and Windows in general, because of licensing. Simple. They don't have to cash to do it. You might also find that the people who have worked at startups are used to dealing with this, because of their own monetary constraints.
Re:Money (Score:4, Interesting)
I do .NET because that's where the money is.
So do you love writing code, or did you just do it for the paycheck?
TFA (yeah, I read it, my bad) says they're looking for people who love to write code, and know how to do it well. They want coders who have a passion for what they do. They want coders who are flexible, and who are able to adapt. They want coders who are able to not only write apps, but who understand what's really going on deep down.
Honestly? I agree with the guy. If you're running a startup, and looking for long-term growth, your initial coders need to be more than merely competent.
I remember when I did a stint working for a small company... these guys, to be exact [daz3d.com]. They had two full-on coders, one hell of a script whiz who knew 3D/CG like the back of his hand, and they had me. I had to learn Qt in very short order, figure out the fun nuances of helping port everything from x86 to PPC (this was pre-Intel Mac). Oh, and we did all of our own documentation, for both the SDK (both code and our own home-grown CG-oriented scripting language) *and* the users. I had to pick up bits and bobs that I thought I'd never have to use after leaving school (dusting off rusty trigonometry skills, blending in gaming, artistic, printing/color, and a whole pile of other concepts). Oh, and we'd just bought the codebase for Bryce [wikipedia.org] during that time and had to clean that up (this is where I learned that Kai Krause can be a very evil man...)
Long story short, in that environment, you had to be agile, and given the insane hours, you had to be agile, and you had to really love doing it. OTOH, I wouldn't trade that for anything. We were outright cowboys by big-corp standards, and had a ball doing it.
In an environment like that? There's zero room for cookie-cutter technologies, or cookie-cutter programmers. (not accusing you, just sayin').
.NET Abstractions Hide The WWW (Score:2, Interesting)
Microsoft has attempted to hide the Internet behind a layer of proprietary abstractions. Whether you were developing an application for the Internet or for old-school client/server technologies was supposedly irrelevant. Given time, this spec slipped away, but it's idiosyncrasies remained.
Consequently when you write a .NET application for the Internet, not a single term in your vocabulary is the same as that of a Perl, Python or Ruby programmer. WWW standards are rarely, if at all, referenced.
Should you place a .NET programmer in front of a Perl web developer, they won't be able to communicate initially, if at all. Their initial (frustrating) dialog will consist of probing attempts to pin down each other's terminology and formulate a common "pidgin" vocabulary.
Astonishingly, this problem did not exist with Microsoft's older pre-.NET developers, who used the ASP framework and the lighter and simpler language VBScript to do web development. Those technologies were consistent with that of WWW standards(ASP was a CGI-like framework). Those developers quickly move to Perl, PHP, Python, and other languages and frameworks without a hitch. In contrast .NET programmers have to be taught everything from scratch, beginning with HTML.