We were even able to downgrade our cloud servers to smaller instances, literally.
I wish .NET was more popular among startups, if only C# could get rid of the "enterpisey" stigma.
What do you mean?
1. Process, process, and more process. Doing anything required layers of management approval. Trivial tasks become month long, or even years long, processes.
2. You have no power or agency. Something is broken? You're a developer, you should be able to fix it right? No. Broken things stay broken. You swim in your lane and keep your head down. Mediocrity is the goal.
3. Optimization doesn't exist. If a process is manual and takes you, a developer, 10 hours, then that's what it is. Nobody gives a flying fuck about tooling. Nobody cares if you spend 50% of your dev time doing random stuff. And if you even dare try to fix it, you will be told it's impossible and you're wasting your time.
4. Management is king. You will have to lie to them. You will have to spend time re-entering the same data in 5 different places so they can read it conveniently. You will have to make Excel workbooks. You will have to dumb things down, and then dumb them down again, and again. Everything is about Jira... Unless they're a really high up manager, in which case you have to take whatever is in Jira and put it in a word doc and send it to them, because they don't know how to open Jira.
It is rarish to find a partial MS shop. Most of this is how hard MS makes it to use other tools. Even in 2025 they have good interop with external tools hamstrung.
Example: SQL Servers JDBC driver will convert an entire table's of data from ASCII to UTF and a full table scan instead of convertering your UTF bind to ASCII and using the ASCII based index. This doesn't break interop but does make it painful to code and one more reason to just use .Net.
If I judged every single company i worked at/interacted with, that uses NodeJs, I'd think that every single Node dev is a 13 year old child with no real experience but who think's he's the hottest shit. That has nothing to do with Node and doesn't really describe _all_ the companies out there.
.NET gets selected because a lot of non tech companies need to do software things, and they pick the stack fits in with their current WinTel stack. The main concerns is having replaceable talent to reliably do x. They're not trying to innovate. They are often doing something like sending out insurance quotes by email. They do this by having strict processes, and having developers stay in their lane. Expect rigid scrum, using dependencies only supported by Microsoft etc, Locked down Dev machines with visual studio only, ask for microsoft dev certs, and expect pre-approved enterprise design patterns up the wazoo. They don't want innovative developers, they want you to fit into the pre existing framework designed by an architect. Your skills can die in such an environment.
There are companies that use .NET that aren't like this, but you have to go out your way to find them.
The fact that large companies pick an established tech over newer ones isn't about .NET/C# per se, it's about large companies and the way they work.
Disagree. I would argue Java is more of a choice for "Enterprise".
Also, would you please define the scope of "enterprise".
If you mean "enterprise" as someone who want consistent and predictable management and productivity, then sure .NET is "enterprisy", because instead of a dragon they want a fossil.
But if you mean "enterprise" as they want to sell their core product, and sometimes that pushes to high developmental velocity with multiple development team to tackle on a feature, then .NET is evolving fast enough that it is not so considered "enterprisy".
Heck, even Ruby on Rails would replace .NET for that, especially when you consider the e-commerce scene that is either Ruby or PHP (Wordpress).
Just look at C# and its incredible language revision every year.
"The main concern is having replaceable talent to reliably do X" as in every other company?
I swear you guys make having a regular job sound like being under slavery. It's just a job. Some companies are boring, that's just part of the job, and being able to adapt to different environments is what makes a good sde imo.
I worked at a PHP shop, it was pure mierda. Worst code I've ever seen in my life. Pure incompetency. Does that say anything about PHP shops as a whole?
Working there you aren't building the next Google, you're probably maintaining a some 20 year old order-to-cash ERP process that's boring, but critically important to the business, and is exactly the software you don't want to move fast and break.
Just don't go work for big enterprises if you don't want that environment. It won't matter what language/tech stack, it's just big non-tech company things.
But there's plenty of us out there that don't mind those jobs. Pay can be good enough, and usually offer great work-life balance. I work IT ops for one. I'm remote, I put in my 9 to 5 and I'm done. I'm (thankfully) not on call, I get unlimited PTO, and my personal time is 100% my own to go do non tech things with.
But I would levy the same complaint with most Java[1] usage as well.
1. https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...
Yes, again, you're criticizing the practices of enterprises not dotnet. It has nothing to do with how "dotnet shops operate".
I'm at a dotnet shop who doesn't work anything like that. I've been at multiple of them. It has nothing to do with dotnet itself.
Oh absolutely. It's a business decision. It just so happens that it's framework that has been around awhile and has a decent bit of support. Give Node another 10 years and that landscape might start to change.
.NET was literally created to replace the Java enterprise ecosystem. It never managed to completely displace it, but effectively gained around half of the enterprise market - and it will take more and more, after Oracle started pulling their usual boa-constrictor moves. C# is as "enterprisey" as they come, and it went full-opensource only once it became a requirement even in the enterprise.
Some Microsoft stuff is really good but it's not universally true. And in the worst cases you end up locked into some hard to migrate off platform that is withering on the vine.