[ale] .NET considered harmful

[Wolf Halton]

Did you look at the jobs section of their site?  Jerald, I think you are 
on target.  These people want to hire creatives who create in lots of ways.

On 03/29/2011 09:09 AM, Jerald Sheets wrote:
> 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 <http://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
> Linux User #183003
> Ubuntu User #32648
> Public GPG Key: http://questy.org/js.asc
> Geek Code: http://questy.org/code
>
> 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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