But back in 2008 there were also good paying jobs for good C and C++ developers. But when I looked at the direction that the local industry was going, I could see that the age of the bit twiddler was dying locally and there were more jobs for “enterprise developers”.

I had a choice between making $20K more as a senior C++ developer or $7K more as a mid level C# developer. I took the latter even though I had 12 years (staying at one company way too long) of development experience.

So that’s what I concentrated on for the next 9 years - the Microsoft stack.

Late last year, I was the dev lead for a decent size company with a small IT department. I was looking to change jobs and once again I saw the writing on the wall. There were a few jobs willing to pay what I wanted writing C# but lots of companies wanted Node/React/React Native.

This time, once again I was offered $15K more as an architect leading a team of 10+ developers writing apps in C# on Windows servers, running Sql server and I had another job offer as a “senior developer” at a smaller company making only $5K more but would get a chance to not only fill in some technical gaps on my end - front end coding with React and back end with Node. I would also get to lead initiatives to make the company more “cloud native” and to restructure the architecture for high availability, scalability, etc. and help build a dev ops culture. But with no official reports (that’s a good thing).

Looking ahead three years, I knew what the better choice would be for my career. Sure there is money now for C# developers but that’s not where the market is going.

But honestly, the salaries for developers and even architects who want to stay mostly hands on and don’t want to go into management outside of Silicon Valley/NYC is stagnating. I realized from my last job that the real money is working for consulting companies with titles like “Implementation architects” and “Digital transformation consultants” who help companies move to the “fourth level of the cloud maturity model”. Yes typing that left a bad taste in my mouth.

So that’s really the game plan - but to speak to all levels of the organization, I need a “more modern tech stack” as one of the recruiters told me.