My recent visit to Xisto’s office & Shridhar’s (Xisto’s founder) hiring spree made me realize a lot of things about state of .NET in India. It can be easily called as “Rakhi Sawant of computer languages!” It’s so popular that every other guy wants to “do it” . Kudos! to Microsoft for ensuring that its technology penetrated the Indian education system however I wonder that what stops colleges from teaching open technologies?

I’m no programmer and have no intention of having any sorts of heated discussion with those who “live & die” by .NET [i'm not even talking about you... read on to understand what I'm trying to say]. David Barrett in his post “Why we don’t hire .NET programmers” has expressed exactly the same thing that I felt while taking the interviews. You can say that I’ve developed a disliking for .NET just because every other guy wants to learn it and start coding even though they aren’t passionate enough. Fuck passion! they want to learn it just because some guy told them to learn .NET as it’ll help them get a job! Unfortunately! they do get a job! The guys coming for interview said only two things -

1. I know .NET
2. I want to learn .NET [even guys applying for the position of designer & network admin]

When we asked them “Why .NET & no other language?” They were as silent as Indian cricket fans who saw Indian lineup crumbling down against South Africa & West Indies’ bowling attack in Cricket World Cup. Some even said “It’ll help me get a job”. Why?, Java, PHP, Ruby and other open languages… can’t these languages get them jobs? Some even didn’t know that what PHP is, I wonder that what kind of programmers are they, even though they have a Facebook account, they don’t know that its running on PHP.

Thanks to various institutes like NIIT, almost 80-90% engineering colleges and millions of parents who want to die in peace once they see their raj dulara/dulari write few lines of code as able-bodied computer engineers [i'm sure various computer engineers from Uttar Pradesh will agree to that -- for you to understand this statement, you'll have to understand the psycy of Indian parents & specially parents from UP -- btw, i have roots from UP too, I'm no racist!], India is producing “amazing robo coders” who’ll just do what they are taught [by someone who learned the language in the same institute] and won’t choose to use their brains. I guess its because it wasn’t programmed in .NET for them!

I’m sure .NET is a powerful language but it’s no good if one just mugs it up, one has to be passionate to learn things and it stands true for every other computer language, heck! it stands true for everything in life! Coming to the consequences of having such wonderful .NET programmers -

Since the people mugging it aren’t technically & logically sound, they end up making crappy software which in turn strengthens India’s image as “low or bad quality service providers”. If things will keep on rolling like this, I’m sure India won’t be the obvious choice for various companies that plan to outsource their development work & rest you all can imagine, it’s not a post about outsourcing.

I just hope that colleges in India decide to take up other open technologies and start to teach good lessons on entrepreneurship as well, only then I guess things will start to look a little better & sane.