.NET 10

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.

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.