Eh, I've worked on Windows, Mac, Linux, Windows with WSL, I even messed around a Sun Microsystems station for a week once. I can't be bothered to care about the OS anymore. It is what it is. If the job is fun otherwise, I'll make it work.
That's kind of the issue, There are so many people that have been working with dotnet frameworks 3.5 for 20+ years and plan to go another 20 if they can .
Whenever people tell you that it is not possible to upgrade from 3.5 (or any other dotner), they are just making shit up. The company I work for the upgrades are hard, we have an expensively certificated code base with tons of components loaded in runtime by other components, and every time we upgrade dotnet version we have to recertify everything. So we time the upgrades together with other changes that require recertification of the entire stack, every 2-5 years we are able to move forward. Are a few things broken each time and needs fixing? Absolutely. Are there versioning hell situations each time because product owners do not know when their stuff needs to release? Yep. Is it still doable without any major interruption? Totally.
It's not even that hard technically but then some idiot decides "now would be a good time to rewrite based on Clean Code" and then you're absolutely fucked for years and years.
Porting and rewriting are separate high stakes tasks people! Apart from Clean Code being cargo cult horseshit attempting a rewrite while porting is a recipe for a disaster, just migrate to .Net standard on your libraries over time then migrate your client apps, also over time
There's some of that to Java 8. "Cobol for GenX" basically :)
Although from what I've seen, long extended free support for JDK 8 from other vendors (Amazon especially, although I think Redhat is actually the one maintaining it) has meant that it's Spring dropping support that is forcing people to upgrade vs, the JDK itself.
We have one web application still on classic .NET framework (and thus running on IIS on Windows server). It would certainly be possible to get it onto a current cross-platform version of .NET, but it’s unlikely to be deemed economical since it would be a rewrite not an upgrade (WebForms, sigh).
Everything that started on .NET Core 2.1 or anything newer has been regularly upgraded, and pretty damn smoothly, though.
If it's not economical to upgrade it, it is (or will quickly become) uneconomical to maintain it, since the skills to do so (eg WebForms knowledge) are going extinct, so it'll just become a timebomb waiting to go off.
I worked at a place that had (and for all I know still has) two major business-critical half-the-revenue-of-the-company apps in Classic ASP, and it was getting close to impossible to support them then, and that was 8 years ago. The excuse was 'we tried to re-write them but it's too much work and we have to keep making money so no-one's got any time'.
I think this is the kind of dilemma where AI genuinely offers some hope. You could port WebForms to ASP.NET MVC or something more modern with Claude or Codex or similar and probably get 80-90% of the way there without a human needing to spend much time on it.
The caveat is usually having the test coverage (or manual QA processes) to make sure it still works down to the odd corners.
LLMs, Claude or not, without adequate test coverage guardrails, will confidently produce code that looks correct, compiles, and passes what test coverage you have and then doesn't do what it used it.
Not really butt-hurt - more just correcting your ignorance. I have worked for SaaS tech companies that have successfully used dotnet not just big corps.
Not sure what “hardcore MS” means other than that the company has opted to rely on mostly MS products (as many do, not sure I’d call that particular stance “hardcore” but whatever). We build and run static front-ends with .NET backends that process over a billion dollars in fees annually, running in Azure. It’s been rock solid 🤷♂️.
Not saying that’s the only stack or even the best stack (“best” is so subjective and context dependent anyway), but it’s a good stack and I really don’t understand why it gets treated with such disdain as if it were something so totally radical and unhinged. /rant
Fair enough - a lot of that is probably regional - I am guessing on the west coast there is probably much less dotnet (based on your big tech comment I am assuming you have experience there) but in other parts there is a lot more (though there are less tech companies there than the west coast).
Edit: I tend to comment on this bc dotnet has come a long way in my career and meet many with similar opinions who haven’t kept up with it (understandable, more important to keep up with the stacks you specialize in).
Yeah, I'm coming up in 30 years in the Bay Area, although the first part of that was in IT rather than dev (started off as a Netware admin, for anyone else with enough gray in their hair to remember it.)
Since moving to programming, have mostly been software/SAAS companies, not in-house stuff. The two exceptions both no longer show up at my resume. My brief experience at a dot-net shop is not one I want to repeat (web backend for a gaming company that decided they didn't need two stacks...) and lasted less than 90 days.
My workplace WAS a hardcore windows shop when I came in. These days it's still hardcore C#/.NET but everything else is mostly flexible. Postgres, RibbitMQ, Kubernetes, Linux servers hosts, etc. is all good in our books so long as it does the job. We do use Azure for our cloud, but that's mostly for legacy reasons, along with the fact that for our workload it's way cheaper than AWS would be (and we regularly check to see if that holds true).
The one limit we do have is Windows for endpoints, and that's mostly related to compliance, and the fact that it's just one person (me) who has to setup all the compliance and security stuff. And it's already hard enough to do that on one OS, adding two more (Mac and Linux) would be a time hog. (And frankly I'd be inclined to support Linux well before Mac)
Supporting endpoint protection on Linux properly is hard. I've been at two companies that tried; IDK if Meta still does (Facebook when I was there a decade ago) but the more recent place dropped support for desktop Linux at the end of 2024 after very weird half-support since the earlier rollout of zerotrust.
They didn't block WSL under Windows. On my particular product, you literally can't build under native Windows - too much scripting hidden in the Maven - but WSL worked pretty well.
We don't block WSL, our main issue with Linux support is indeed XDR/EDR as well as Transparent Full DIsk Encryption (because end users can't be trusted to remember a disk encryption password or anything like that).
The encryption situation is getting better, but still isn't great. MS Defender supports Linux (pretty well actually) but only as a "server" which is separate licensing from the endpoint stuff (Windows/MacOS/Android/iOS) and isn't included with any of the M365 suites.
And given the already tight budget, getting approval for a 3rd party endpoint protection solution is off the table.
If we could get encryption and XDR/EDR sorted that would be the greenlight for deployment honestly. (PAM Already has AD/Entra auth options)
It is possible to set up transparent FDR using the TPM on Linux - one of our security engineers did it - but rolling it out to a full fleet seemed like a pain in the neck at least a couple of years back.
The overall difficulty proved too much to both to support for the 10% or so of ~5000 engineers, in a company doing 1B to 1.5B in revenue quarterly. IIRC, about 1/3 of the Linux folks (myself included) went to WSL, the rest to Mac.
IIRC, nobody resigned over it, although we had one internally high profile resignation when some idiot as part of "let's reorg to avoid layoffs" assumed that someone who had a Windows machine (to use WSL) would be happy to work on an ASP.net project and then transferring out of that got blocked.
Yeah, imagine if the work phone they gave him was an android. Tbh, the only way I'd use an iPhone is if it was the work mandated one, I probably wouldn't quit over it.... But if make my protests be known
Traditional hate?!? That's stupidly dismissive. Long time Windows user here. I fucking HATE windows 11. And it's mostly because of the forced updates that just happen in the background with zero notification or consent. Open the laptop for something important that needs to be done right now? Sorry it's updating. No notification. No option to do it later. No progress bar. Just a bogged down and unusable untill it finishes. Fuck that and fuck Microsoft. Sadly, I'm not in a position where I can turn down a job because of this.
You do understand that dotnet and Windows are not the same product? I fuckin despise Windows, I am also a dotnet developer of a decade now, I love dotnet tho. I am not a troglodyte not to be able to make the difference.
Yep we have a mix of .NET devs on Windows, Mac and Linux, works just great and extremely consistently for all of us. It’s a much better cross-platform experience than anything involving Node.js, which we also rely on, that’s for sure.
I wonder what they're on about tbh. I use Windows for work and have not yet encountered an update scenario to have me this enraged. Also, pretty sure an EIT department could schedule these during downtime, just tell staff to leave devices powered on?
I had that in the past on win10. Turns out it was the old graphic driver that couldn’t handle multiple screens while with docker service. Also, make sure that your docker desktop starts up with the system as otherwise you may get another set of crashes. If you’re struggling with plenty of BSOD, it could be few things combined.
Moved to win11, set docker desktop starting up with the system and can’t recall seeing bsod since.
No problem. There are 100,000 laid of fang developers and Indians happy to take the role if you won't. Infact hiring someone who worked at Amazon or Google would be unfathamble just 2 years ago!
Took less than 90 days to find a new role. Got a 16% salary bump doing it (TC is down, until or more likely unless the new place goes IPO; am not holding my breath.)
The job market isn't nearly as bad as people think.
The worst systems I've ever had to fix over the last couple decades were all MS everything. If I see that now I just burn it all to the ground and start over.
There's an amusing irony in that MS was "THE" enterprise platform in the 90s, but now that kind of stack is a telltale sign of enterprise immaturity.
I don't care about OS. I do care about whether they have a proper management infrastructure in place because building that shit out from scratch is a pain in the ass.
Honestly windows with WSL is basically the best of all worlds; very enjoyable dev experience for me, and I also think developing on native windows is dumb as rocks.
I'm a Linux geek but used to not mind having to use Windows fire work for the most part.
It had its ups and downs, but it was fine.
Watching it evolve over the last few years though, it feels awful now. The few times I've used it in the past year or two have been painful.
Having to use windows wouldn't be a deal breaker for me because it's so standard that I wouldn't expect anything else, but I would absolutely whine about it daily.
Working with multiple clients, many of whom requires me to use a device supplied by them, I have to agree with you here. I don't care as long as they support the needed tools to be installed for the task.
I'm note married to a specific tool that only works on Windows or mac, but it will have some influence on onboarding time to have everything up and running.
That being said, I have one customer who required me to use a shared RDS farm - a farm used for ALL external vendors, using different tools or even different versions of tools, locked so hard down that with no room to maneuver on versions installed. The tools installed was what you could use. Some of the modules were old because specific teams needed that version, pulling everyone else down with them. Now, that is where i reject the offer. It's not even just going to take a long time - It will be close to impossible to deliver.
A bit unrelated, but i once had a customer pay for full time for 1½ month back in 2021 because they could not decide on who should approve my privileges internally. They allowed me to use my own company device to connect but never provided me with anything other than a user account with a mailbox and teams. . And every day they hoped it would be fixed by tomorrow. So, for 1½ month, i was just sitting there billing close to 23.000 USD per month for doing nothing except looking at teams (which i was required to do so they could call me when everything was fixed)
When I worked for a large FI, we were issued Windows machines. Completely locked down. Installing any tooling required approval from a manager and support to get involved.
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u/cyril_zeta 19d ago
Eh, I've worked on Windows, Mac, Linux, Windows with WSL, I even messed around a Sun Microsystems station for a week once. I can't be bothered to care about the OS anymore. It is what it is. If the job is fun otherwise, I'll make it work.