It wasn't until I started college, where I had to use Linux to get my assignments done, etc. that my mind got stretched open. In three months I couldn't believe I survived in Windows for that long.

As an employer, the fact that someone has only ever developed in Windows and also uses Windows at home, tells me that at best they can appreciate unix and unix philosophy, but that it's unlikely they could build tools that do the right thing and play well in a unix environment, no matter how many years of experience they've had building tools.

But not only that, unix goes deeper and teaches you about how to do things inside your program, even if that part never talks to other programs. Things like do the dumb thing first; or when you have nothing to say, say nothing (e.g. `ls` prints nothing if no files found), etc. It's about mindset and values and those are almost always dictated by the environment. Also values cannot be looked up on stackoverflow and copy/pasted in 5 minutes. They take a long time to sink in and I can understand why an employer would want to skip that cost when hiring.

Also Windows teaches you values that are not appreciated by UNIX wizards: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Biculturalism.html

"Unix culture values code which is useful to other programmers, while Windows culture values code which is useful to non-programmers." (really: read the whole article!)

I'm pretty firmly in the Unix camp on this. 'I can't program' should be as rare as 'I can't read.'

What makes programming so special that it needs to be different here?

You might as well write, 'reading exists so most people don't need to read,' which would be equivalently true.

> What makes programming so special that it needs to be different here?

Because directing computers to perform work is as fundamental a skill in the modern world as is reading. Yes, there are people nowadays who cannot read, and there are some few jobs for them. But there aren't many, and it's not a good place to be.

Programming is not a specialised skill: it is a general skill with applicability in almost every field of human endeavour.

Joel, the author of the article you linked to, states the core value of Windows as being "useful to non-programmers" basing it on "By contrast, Windows was created with one goal only: to sell as many copies as conceivable at a profit". The former does not follow from the latter.

Microsoft didn't need to rely on usefulness to anyone to sell many copies, and they didn't. As for why Linux isn't non-programmer friendly, I beg to differ. Android is a prime example and the argument as to why it's not doing well on desktop, as Linus Torvalds puts it, is because no one ships Linux on their desktops. Microsoft has a lot to do with that. When and if they ever do, Aunt Marge will be as happy using Linux without even knowing it's Linux (does the average non-programmer know that Android is Linux?)

There's still Linux underneath -- it's not stock Ubuntu, not by a long shot -- but it's Linux.

Unless she wants to print something... [1]

[1] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cups-horror.html

"1. Make sure the printer is turned on. 2. Connect the printer to your system... 3. A message will appear when the system is finished installing the printer..."

https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/printing-setup.ht...

I had to really use it when I started to do automated builds, and since then it opened my mind on the value of command line and above all the unix philosophy, which I really consider as super important now.

If I had to hire, I'd be relunctant to hire someone with Windows-only experience, not because I think the stack is bad, but because it's unlikely this person adhere to the Unix philosophy and is able to write scripts for small tasks, and automate important tasks with scripts.

I don't have evidence of a wide random sampling of "trendy" employers but based on anecdotes[1][2], I think it is.

Many trendy companies (a.k.a. "hot startups") overwhelmingly favor a Linux + open source stack. If the hiring managers at these companies see a resume with just ".NET/Winforms/WPF/ASP.NET", they perceive a negative signal.

Yes, writing a loop to display a list in ASP.NET should be Turing equivalent to writing a loop in Node.js/Golang but people don't think purely on equivalences of computer science concepts. They also think about "culture" and a resume that's exclusively ".NET" looks "corporate" and "enterprisey" instead of "cutting edge" and "hip".

My advice to potential job seekers who only have "MS .NET platform" as a skill: start a github profile with projects using Linux/Node/Golang/etc to help counteract the adverse cultural selection bias.

[1]https://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont...

[2]"And the .NET developers are mostly enterprise folks who don’t like working in rough-and-tumble startup world. Remember, I worked at Visual Studio magazine and had a front-row seat." from http://scobleizer.com/myspaces-death-spiral-due-to-bets-on-l...

Being in the .NET ecosystem exclusively can also mean a reliance on IDEs and .NET-specific tooling to be productive (or things like Eclipse refactoring for Java).

And there's the simple fact that there are a lot of qualified candidates who do more than just .NET/just Java. Polyglot programmers are more likely to be flexible and be in the right environment.

Of course people can be good enough, but it's not just about the looks. Things happen differently depending on the tooling.

Now, the extended part of this discussion is that maybe it's fine, and companies should be able to onboard people into a technology. Because, hey, it's just programming right? But that could mean looking at a multi-month training session until you're looking at someone as productive as the guy who's familiar with the tech already. Not all experience in programming is equivalent.

An aside: I feel like this discussion usually has a lot of "web programming is easy" undertones (it hasn't been explicit but we all know what "trendy" means). But I don't think there would be as much of this discussion if it were something like "web-only developer applies to work on embedded systems with basically no C experience".

"Programmers who used Java or C# (when interviewing with us) go on to pass interviews with companies at half the rate of programmers who use Ruby or JavaScript. (The C# pass rate is actually much lower than the Java pass rate, but the C# numbers are not yet significant by themselves.)"

http://blog.triplebyte.com/who-y-combinator-companies-want

Actually, it's Mac on the desktop, Linux on the server.

If the hiring managers at these companies see a resume with just ".NET/Winforms/WPF/ASP.NET", they perceive a negative signal.

Run, don't walk, from doomed companies like that.

Now that the OS is no longer an issue, why isn't C# seeing more startup usage? Just look what StackOverflow does with it.[2] Startups shouldn't be judging developers for knowing it, they should be looking at it themselves.

[1]: http://www.ageofascent.com/asp-net-core-exeeds-1-15-million-... [2]: http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/7/21/stackoverflow-upda...

Now .Net is now also open source it would seem that the only proprietary part to the stack is Windows itself, and shortly .Net is going to be running on any platform.

Coming from a Mono background, this was very weird to me.

Very true. This used to be a point of contention where I work, but was easily fixed by having an automated process for getting our lawyers to approve OSS code (with a Nuget or Github URL). We still have to do it on a per-project basis (not per-license), but we're using lots of OSS code now and I've made a little headway on open-sourcing some of our own stuff.

These days OSS advocacy isn't that hard, especially with the hard facts demonstrated by CoreCLR.

To some degree, it's true. Many of my colleagues never touched node.js til Microsoft started using it. Or Linux til Azure supported it. Or functional programming til F#, or git etc.

Java developers seem more comfortable searching online and piecing together a solution from oracle, apache common, other 3rd parties. It feels like they're better at critically inspecting packages for performance, applicability, adoption since they don't have a mother corp creating or blessing every product. nuget has helped a lot of .NET devs come out of their cave and explore the great unknown that is open source.

Hopefully Microsoft's recent reinvention of itself changes both this perception of .NET devs and whatever reality is behind it.

Couldn't there also be the reason that before Microsoft started to become active in Node.js the Windows support for it was really bad (bad Windows support is a typical problem of lots of open source projects; I mean: I could understand it if OS X (at least the same degree proprietary) support were similarly bad, but this is usually not the case).

Transitioning to Node+TS from .Net is fairly straightforward (setting aside the completely new tooling, building, open source package resources, etc), and you get microservices + much better performance with minimal friction.

Granted, large-scale systems of the Node variety are a world's difference from .Net, but that is not insurmountable.

The appeal is more than simply improving compatibility -- the whole microservices movement had been happening beneath Microsoft's noses, and this is their response to it. It is nothing short of impressive how they have expanded the .Net stack in order to remain current.

One reason I, and others like me have looked down on .NET developers, is that a large number of them aren't any good. I've meet brilliant .NET developer, some of the most talented developers I know are .NET developers, but the crappiest developers I know are .NET developers as well.

Some developers are completely ignorant in respect to computers, the Internet, algorithms and new technology in general, and they are almost exclusively working on Windows and by extension .NET. These are developers that can make code work, but take Visual Studio away from them and they cease to be developers.

It's by no means fair, because as I said, some of the best developers I know are .NET developers. It's just that I've never see anyone working on Linux/Unix be completely ignorant other languages, tools and platforms.

Ha, during my brief stint at a windows-shop after graduating, I did meet a few who couldn't get their heads around the concept of having a build happen without someone clicking a green triangle button in VS.

Bear in mind, a lot of .Net developers don't even know it's possible to compile their projects outside of Visual Studio. Msbuild, Nant, csc.exe, "what are those?"

"Bear in mind, a lot of .Net developers don't even know it's possible to compile their projects outside of Visual Studio. Msbuild, Nant, csc.exe, "what are those?" There's probably plenty of java developers like that as well.

I've never seen Team Foundation Server in a .NET shop. It's either been SVN, Git or Perforce. That being said I think it's very individual, but many small companies won't pay for TFS, they barely want to pay for Visual Studio Professional/Enterprise edition

I wont argue about it, our experiences differ, and that's cool :)

Ironically, I have recently started using .NET MVC for my projects since I think it's really great. It beats many alternative MVC-frameworks in my opinion.

I moved from commercial .NET coding to startup-land a few years ago, and there's definitely a learning curve. I had to ditch Windows on my personal PC and start using Linux at home to really get the hang of it. YMMV.

I have immense issues understanding the platform and how everything work. For example, scheduling jobs is something I still don't fully understand.

The thing I didn't get (and still don't fully appreciate) is the power of bash - you can write almost-serious code in this!

And some of the standard CLI utilities (stand up awk) are like pocket universes of depth and complexity.

Windows probably has a lot of the same stuff, I hear good things about PowerScript, but it's not so standard to use it as a code monkey.

I miss Visual Studio sometimes. The mess of terminal windows and text editors that I code in now is frustrating at times.

Just use emacs for everything! It runs in X, it runs in a TTY, it runs everywhere.

My own stack is st[1], tmux & emacs, with Firefox as my browser, within a tiling window manager. I have a single terminal open at any point in time, with tmux multiplexing the sessions. I use C-z as the tmux escape key, because it's easy to type and doesn't do any harm if I accidentally type it outside of tmux. I autostart emacs in server mode from a systemd unit[2] and run it under X.

Sometimes I use emacs's TTY or shell modes. This is something I'd like to explore more. If I did this, I might be able to have one window for both shells and text editing.

Regardless, I have one terminal window to rule them all and one editor window to rule them all. With Firefox tabs, I only need one web-browser window too (although I'm considering using emacs-w3m and/or eww more).

[1] http://st.suckless.org/ [2] https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsAsDaemon#toc8

I recommend eshell

However, I still use the terminal by using ConEMU with Git Bash to get git in the terminal because I don't know how else to do it. But you mention bash and awk, I have never in my years of experience really used these tools a lot either.

Maybe some small bash-script to backup or something similar, but nothing else really. You don't have to use it and most of the times it's easier to write a python script or what not.

I haven't really bothered to learn any PowerShell except "Update-Database" in the Package Manager Console.

I don't use bash a lot, but there is an expectation in Linux-land that everyone has some familiarity with it. That's not true in the Windows world so much. In my experience anyway. I'd be interested to see if a much more functional shell environment generates more use of it.

[1] https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc738335(v=ws.10...

Typical hip startups use "tools" (frameworks, libraries, etc.) that abstract underlying platform to such an obscene degree, that it doesn't really matter, if the platform is POSIX-compatible or not.

After all these years, I still am mystified by the whole technology/stack religion that pervades software engineering. I come from a mechanical engineering background. There's many ideologies on how to solve mechanical problems, but I would never hear "oh I see you have AutoCAD on your resume...we are looking for more of a life-cycle-engineering type of engineer" during an interview. A discussion like that would not even make sense.

The whole .NET/LAMP/XAMPP/GemStone/whatever solution stack you use does not define who you are.

I still consider myself a Mechanical Engineer who happens to be in the software engineering field who happens to choose .NET to solve problems since I'm highly productive on that platform.

In reality its a fast moving stack, that's constantly innovating.

The wast majority of people, who claim .NET experience can launch Visual Studio, then some wizards to generate skeleton of the app and then fill something to have a CRUD "solution".

They spoil it for the folks, who are truly experienced. The claims in the CVs are so maximized (Dunning-Kruger at the extreme), that it's simpler to just ignore .NET experience.

This is the ignorance. There are people who are pretty bad on other stacks as well. I know many competent .NET developers. And many terrible PHP developers.

On average the average .NET developer is more skilled then your average Python developer. This has about as much substance as your claim.

1. Choose a different language for your next side project. 2. Step in the door with C#, try to help out on projects or change positions inside the company. 3. Attend hackathons, contribute to opensource projects.

A good programmer can quickly feel comfortable in any programming language. Recruiters feel more comfortable when you can actually show proof of that.

As an opposite to what, exactly?

> A good programmer can quickly feel comfortable in any programming language.

This is not true. It takes a not-insignificant amount of time to just learn to write idiomatic code, let alone making oneself familiar with all the quirks and idiosyncrasies of libraries and frameworks.

I personally know many languages a little bit, but I find writing my CV to target a specific stack results in a better responsive.

My first company (as a non-programmer) was very much like this. It was very corporate and they weren't willing to take a risk on cross training a hobbyist without the requisite boxes checked on a resume. It was frustrating but I also understand the CYA logic behind it.

There's someone willing to take a risk on you somewhere for some amount of money. Having a github with noob code in the language you are trying to get hired for helps. If you are just starting out, being able to show you want it bad enough to learn it off the clock is a strong signal vs "I'll start learning it if you start paying me" (which is...also a signal).

I have strong experience in the .NET ecosystem and good experience with nix platforms and commonly related technologies (including Java and Ruby). When I interviewed for a part time freelance gig with a company on Upwork, they were concerned about my nix experience. They wanted to make sure that since they were a .NET shop, that I wouldn't try to get them to use any non traditional Windows based technologies.

I told them that I'm not partial one way or the other - I just like to use the best tool for the job regardless of where it's hosted. I did end up working for them for a short period of time, but it didn't work out long term.

I think it's less common now than it used to be but back in their heyday Java devs looked down hard on .NET devs. I think it's because MS visual IDEs, going all the way back to vb6, made a lot of people think they were professional developers just because they could create a basic crud program with a functional GUI very easily. This ended up promoting a huge amount of unusually bad code/coders to production environments and with that the bad rap .NET devs get to this day. The perception is that developers outside of the MS ecosystem usually have to be a little bit more erudite in the way they went about learning their programming language of choice.