jobs & salaries

[Joseph Sinclair]

Welcome to the other side ;}
I spent over 10 years developing Windows applications, I still do some .Net work from time to time.  If it's the best tool for a particular task, or if it's what the employer wants, and they cannot be persuaded to consider other options, then that's what gets used.

I've never been terribly fond of VS, especially the latest VS.Net versions, too much eye-candy, not enough real productivity.  That said, I wouldn't do .Net development without it (especially since VB doesn't really exist except as a VS module).
If you're interested in Java tools, look at Netbeans (www.netbeans.org), I actually prefer it to Eclipse, although many people disagree with me.  Eclipse has the mindshare (mostly because IBM really knows how to market, and Sun doesn't), but Netbeans definitely has some significant feature advantages.

Try Subversion as a CVS alternative, it fixes a lot of CVS issues.  I agree Source Safe is lousy, it's basically RCS with some limited additions, in fact the early versions were nothing more than RCS ripped directly from BSD Unix (SunOS 4.1 IIRC).

The most common ways to earn a living doing Linux development are by working on large Enterprise applications that have to be supported on Linux (Oracle, SAP, etc...), or by developing fully cross-platform systems (often in Python or Java).
Embedded development is, slowly, moving more towards using embedded Linux as well.

In my experience, the rates for software development are largely independent of O/S, the development skillset is more commonly the primary driver (i.e. PHP, Java, C++, .Net, etc...).

Many smaller/medium companies are starting to do more development with FLOSS technologies because of the advantages available.  The larger companies tend to delay in this regard because management and legal issues are more important to them than development productivity.

==Joseph++

Josh Coffman wrote:
> 'tag
> 
>   Here's my dirty little secret. I'm a windows
> developer. I'm pretty good at it and make a good
> living. I've switched to linux at home(except a dual
> boot for some side-work) mostly because I was tired of
> MS annoyances, the cost, and I was generally curious.
> 
>   One area I've still see MS more favorably is in
> development. Part of that is because I've been doing
> it for a little while. (Ok, maybe more than a little.)
> While I like Eclipse, I haven't seen dev tools that
> come close to Visual Studio even with it's stupid
> annoyances. Although, CVS has got to be better than
> SourceSafe; that's what I call crap. 
> 
>   Also, I have no idea how one would earn a living in
> linux other than network or server admin stuff. So
> please educate me. What do people use develop apps?
> What sort of salaries or contract rates are out there?
> Anyone else ever made the switch from MS-dev to linux
> dev?
> 
> -j
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 		
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