Always confused that people talk about .Net as if it's failed on here, any time I look for employment in the UK there is a seemingly unlimited amount of high paying C# jobs available and it doesn't take long to get hired. Even my university taught in C# for the first year.
Net core is a slow moving project for sure, and it's not at a stage to use in production yet, but it'll get there and I look forward to further improvements made in 2018.
In the UK C# occupies the main enterprise language slot that Java does in America, that's why. Java just didn't get as far here. I remember in mid-2000s not being sure whether to learn Java or VB6/.Net, but a few years later I rarely saw Java jobs.
At least that's my impression from being on HN for the last decade, and working mainly in MS back-end languages in the UK.
The other one I never see mentioned in the UK is Oracle, I've only had Oracle mentioned to me IRL once, and that's because the local council is inexplicably moving from MS SQL to Oracle for reporting, but they're super incompetent.
Aahhh, thank you for stating this. I’m reading HN for only 1 year and half and couldn’t figure out why Java seemed so present in conversation as I thought it was not spread that much.
I’m french and I only know one person who’ve been on the Java path, and he’s not even working in France. I of course know companies working on Java, but not that much (not at all, if you except those working for Android) and suddenly it becomes crystal clear.
While that's true, C# isn't limited to enterprise.
I've worked in startups and digital agencies throughout my career, and C# is everywhere in the latter. It's a lot harder to find startup work, but there are people building on the .NET framework.
You can happily make a career in .NET without ever working in an enterprise capacity.
.NET is pretty popular in the UK and elsewhere (particularly in finance) but you also see Java/Oracle in the same space. There are moves towards JavaScript/TypeScript for modern front-ends though.
The only place .NET appears to be discounted is in SV, at least from those I've talked to. Outside of that it's fairly mainstream but obviously you see more of it if you work with it and write/talk about it.
Sure, HN is exceptionally SV-skewed. .NET is the bread and butter of most small and middle businesses around the world, as it's Java and Oracle for upper-middle and enterprise.
I was a consultant in SF, we had plenty of huge Fortune 500 customers running .Net. The bigger problem was most of their desire to try to outsource everything to "save" money.
Net core is production ready since more than 1 year, Net Core tooling was not perfect until 6 month ago. Still the whole project from zero to version 1 in 2 year is not fast, its insanely fast ! Find something with comparable features made in less time (runtime, libraries, tooling etc..)
Most programming jobs on the world are for writing enterprise CRUD, that is not a public activity and not technically challenging (it is challenging, but in other ways) enough to be of interest here.
Same where I am. JS is usually the most popular in job ads, but C# seems way more popular than java in business, at least judging from ads. Go, python etc doesn’t seem wanted much. Probably because the software industry isn’t so focused around web tech corporations but on traditional industry, government, financial etc.
I think it’s the US in general and SV in particular bias of HN: there is an under-representation of the meat-and-potatoes software industry. The one where an average employment is 10 years, and an average employee is 40.
Getting .NET/Java jobs has never been an issue. If that was Microsoft's motivation why even open source it? The open sourcing of .NET was to get the mind share of open source developers predominately on Linux. It hasn't fared better than Mono in that respect.
Net core is a slow moving project for sure, and it's not at a stage to use in production yet, but it'll get there and I look forward to further improvements made in 2018.