Industry Facing Shortage of Microsoft .NET Developers

It’s a platform that doesn’t generate a lot of love from developers, but Microsoft’s .NET (News - Alert) is very much in demand by employers, according to a new report from job site Dice.

Companies have posted more than 10,000 openings requiring.NET skills this year, a growth rate of 25 percent from 2010, says Dice. But job-seeking developers have been slow to take the bait, creating more demand than supply.

Why are developers hesitant to dive into .NET jobs? Dice cites a couple of reasons.

Some feel that if they become typecast as .NET developers then they may have trouble expanding their repertoire to other programming platforms. Others point to lower salaries since programmers who work with .NET earn around $83,000 a year, compared with Java specialists who take in an annual salary of more than $91,000.

But Dice believes such concerns are shortsighted. As a platform that’s been around for more than ten years, .NET is not something that “pigeonholes” programmers. And though salaries for .NET developers may be comparatively low, the job site believes wages will rise if demand continues to outpace supply.

Further, .NET is a good entry point for developers without a vast amount of experience. Dice calls it a “relatively straightforward framework to learn.” Though companies are always looking for mid-career .NET programmers, 27 percent of the jobs in Dice’s database have been for .NET professionals with less than three years experience.

I can vouch for the comments about .NET. Though I do development work, I don’t consider myself a professional programmer by trade and have no true educational background in programming. However, I help maintain a .NET environment for one of my Web clients. When I first dived into .NET, I had very little programming experience. But by viewing and troubleshooting existing code. I eventually caught on to the platform. Add in a couple of courses that I’ve since taken in VB.NET, and I now feel fairly at ease working in the environment.

Plus, my experience with .NET has made it easier to dabble in other programming languages where the syntax may differ but the concepts are the same.

As Dice concludes, job seekers experienced in .NET won’t get lost in the shuffle. But they should prepare to negotiate for a healthy salary at the start since those initial wages will be the base for the next few years.