[ale] .NET considered harmful

[Jerald Sheets]

Some of this falls under the failure of education, though.

I worked at a small webhosting concern in Baton Rouge that eventually got to the point that we refused to hire graduates from LSU's CS department for much the same reasons.  

LSU was turning out Pascal programmers in 1996 with no knowledge of networks (but a limited understanding of protocols) and couldn't troubleshoot anything.  They could program you under the table in Pascal, but had no knowledge of any other arena of programming (Assembler?  VB? C?...these were reserved for engineering majors and were unavailable to CS students except as electives)  Sure, with some work they could pick up the ColdFusion work and the PHP work our developers were doing, but chances were slim (based on our experience).  It had been proven time and time again they were one-trick ponies with blinders on, unwilling to change and unable to be employed if they didn't...USUALLY demanding huge salaries just because they graduated college.  

I think the issue more lies in substance. 

For instance, I'm a SysAdmin.  I have done a fair amount of ksh/bash and, thanks to Weather.com, was introduced to Perl and have been very happy with it since.

If I come to you for a Sysadmin job, one of the primary distinguishing characteristics of a "Senior" level admin is that they have a language or two to their credit.  No, not necessarily C or Pascal (although they may), but you certainly expect there to be Perl, Shell, perhaps Python, maybe even PHP and other "admin-y" sort of qualifications on there.  If I didn't, wouldn't you consider something to be not quite right?

All I think the author is saying is, if I've got a person who is a true-blue programmer, a "maker of things", chances are extremely good they will have core languages where the sky is the limit, and if they really love programming and do it all the time, will ultimately become annoyed at "cookie-cutter" environments that lay everything out in pre-fabricated ways.  Not because those ways are particularly bad but because it isn't the nature of a programmer of the type they are searching for.  One who works from the ground up in core programming rather than platform development.  There is a difference, and it is not small.

I'm not saying I agree or disagree, but I am saying I can see where he's coming from and its not all that strange.

When we hire systems people, we look for guys that dig Linux/UNIX.  Those who have a little network at home and are versed in multiple flavors of the beast.  Those who belong to clubs and have friends in the business; who go to seminars or installfests because it's fun and this is as much their hobby as it is their career.  These guys will ultimately be more valuable, informed, happy, and long-lived in the position than someone who isn't of this ilk, and only got into UNIX because it can "pay the bills".

That, unless I'm sorely mistaken, is what he's looking for at his company.  It has very little to do with .NET or Microsoft and very much to do with the character of the people he's looking for.


#!/jerald
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On Mar 29, 2011, at 2:33 AM, Brian Schenken wrote:

> No wordsmithery could make his silly prejudice reasonable.  He may be
> looking for what you accept is a different breed, but he needs to
> figure out how to articulate it without delving into his own emotional
> bias.  Having written in  .net is not evidence of some sort of
> weakness.
> 
> Yeah, there's a tremendous market for worthless certs that has
> polluted IT's and other's talent pools.  The quality of education out
> there has nothing to do with the value of any given technology.
> That's apples and oranges...

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