Ask HN: Work as .NET independant contractor in SF/Bay Area? Or re-specialize?

2 pointsThrowawayUry7y ago2 comments

I wanted to ask you if you think if there's interest for a SF/Bay Area company to hire a senior .NET developer as a semi-remote independent contractor / consultant, or if it's better to shore up other skills.

I'm a longtime developer, working mostly on .NET for an U.S. company as an employee for a South American branch, getting a (good by local standards) South American salary, but I've hit the "glass ceiling" and the only way to get a better salary is to go the management path.

I have an U.S. business visa so I thought I might try my hand going to SF and interviewing for .NET positions next year, working mostly remotely, but I do have where to stay in SF for short periods of in-house work (crunch times, project prep or whatever is needed).

I know .NET is not the most used stack, I don't know if I'd have more success if I brush up React/Vue (I'm not a fan of frontend work), I'm mostly a backend person. I work with Java occasionally but I'd rather not. Rails demand has gone way down from what I see, but seems much more in demand than .NET - should I learn it?. I have a chatbot in production use but it's very basic - I did try out all the current frameworks. I'm also very comfortable with Azure but not at all with AWS.

Pretty sure I'd at least learn the basics of AWS, but I'm not sure where to spend the next few months preparing. I probably should shore up on the algorithms interview questions but those are unrelated to the actual job :)

Very grateful for any feedback.

2 comments

ljquintanilla7y ago

Doesn't hurt to learn other skills that are in demand like Node. However being an independent contractor you're at an advantage (when building new solutions) because the client may not care what you use as long as you build a deliverable that meets their requirements and solves their problem. In my opinion which may be biased since I prefer the .NET and Microsoft ecosystem there's never been a better time to be on .NET. The new direction for the company is .NET Core which means great performance and cross-platform capabilities. The ease of deployment allows for leveraging the cloud with containers and serverless solutions that can run on Windows or Linux environments. Add on to that SQL Server starting with 2016 being available on Linux and you have a winner. That's on the back end of things. On the front end you have ASP.NET Core with support for SPA applications if you choose not to use Razor Pages. You also have Blazor which look interesting as well. For mobile development you have Xamarin. If you want to do Machine Learning you have tools like ML.NET and CNTK. Long story short, with Microsoft becoming more open and offering tools for developers to be productive on Azure as well as ways for people to build the next wave of solutions like Chatbots, Augmented Reality, Microservices, etc. having invested so much time on the .NET platform can be rewarding because the transition to these new set of tools can be seamless and your opportunities endless.

ThrowawayUryOP7y ago

Thank you ! You're right, maybe getting better on what I do know and try to sell solutions not technology.

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