Ask HN: Should I quit .NET programming to get away from enterprise-y work?

2 pointsunknownsky3y ago1 comments

In the first years of my career, I would talk to users, get to know their business domain and model it with them. I would find their problems, and then open up Balsamiq Mockups and put together something that would make their workday easier. If they liked it, I would have a cost/benefit conversation with the person paying the bills or some other stakeholders. Then if I got the green light, my team and I would build it with .NET and JavaScript. I loved my job.

10 years later and I'm now a senior developer, but I feel like my career is evolving backwards. I am now working on a tiny sliver of a huge system. I know nothing about the user or their business domain because they are so far away from my work. I'm clueless about how my work fits into the business needs because those decisions are made by someone I've never met high up a command chain. I don't get to find problems and creatively solve them. I don't get to see the moving parts of user needs, business needs, frontend needs and backend needs, nor do I get to engineer solutions for all those needs to effectively fit together. I hate my job.

How do I make myself attractive for employers with smaller projects? I've heard the suggestion that I should look for startup jobs, but my early projects were all in big companies and I still got to do smaller self-contained projects.

Is the problem .NET? If I switched career track to .Node.js, would I attract the kind of projects I love?

1 comments

1 comments · 1 top-level

HelloNurse3y ago

You should be able to change role, at a different company, without embracing dumpster fire technology more than strictly necessary.

"Enterprisey" organizations like trendy languages and platforms too, usually adopting them in particularly clumsy and painful ways, while mature organizations can do a good job with .Net and Javascript or any other "stack"; don't assume correlation.