East and West

Just had a conversation with a super nice woman from a company out on the west coast who is in the business of engineering. She made a really interesting point about how .NET and Java are not really sought after technologies from the perspective of engineers on the west coast. Quite the contrary, developers over there really want to sink their teeth into the Pythons and Rubys of the world.

I don’t know if I’d say the opposite is true on the east coast but from where I’m sitting companies tend to be at least 5 or 6 years behind the curve.  Java and .NET are really the only games in town in the DC/Baltimore area.     Which is a shame because languages like Python and Ruby have long since matured into production level technologies that can be reliably deployed – and, in my humble opinion, these languages are easier to develop in and produce more maintainable and robust code.

It will be the case eventually that the only customers these old-tech companies hold on to are those that want to but cannot switch away from old-tech’s software.  Yes it’s more expensive software that’s harder to use but it’s more expensive software that’s harder to use that all their employees are familiar with.  And the only way to get it out of there is to rip it out of their cold, dead hands.