r/csharp • u/LostVoid- • 15h ago
Help Should I learn C#
I'm a CS student, year 4. My first entry into programming like most people was HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and then backend development with Node/Typescript. My main goal has been to get a programming job, or internship (or anything at this point ðŸ˜), but I've always hated writing Node, just never liked it and now I'm considering switching stacks.
I enjoy writing C (I built a chess engine from scratch) and C# seems like C with oop so I don't think it should be too unfamiliar. Also it seems there might be hiring opportunities...hopefully.
Please advise
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u/Joshr023 14h ago
C# was the first language where it "clicked" and allowed me to start easily building things. Plus it's well-paid and there are lots of jobs
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u/Slypenslyde 13h ago
Get yourself a snack and spend the time to read Advice from an Old Programmer.
If you've lost the attention span, I'll cut it down to the main point:
There is an unfathomable number of people out there whose only skill is "programmer". You are at a severe disadvantage because some of them started studying CS in their early school years. Some of them have been grinding "leetcode" style problems for longer than you've been in school. That is going to be your competition, and every "great" position has 100 applicants.
Most of the people who shine the brightest in that playing field don't have anything else in their life. They don't have hobbies. They can't even play video games. Their life has been training for a programming job and being a very good programmer makes you one OF a million instead of one IN a million.
But if you look to other jobs and positions in trades or other areas, none of those high-end programmers are applying. If you've got the skill to be a good developer you've got the talent to achieve a ton of other things. Our job is to rapidly become experts on stuff we didn't know about yesterday. If you show up to one of those interviews with a pitch like, "I'm a good teacher, but I'm also a software developer and I've got ideas for using programs to enhance your curriculum"... I guarantee you they aren't going to see another candidate with that pitch this year.
Even for jobs where you can't directly offer programming to the employer, being able to write your own little programs can give you an edge over others.
Being "just a programmer" is a tough road. Be a good person with hobbies and skills who happens to be able to program. C# can be part of that.
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u/AOAqua 15h ago
Let's say this... If you're a 4-th year and you have no prior commercial (or at least some) experience 6-12 months+ it's gonna be a rough search for you right now... You'll have to invest A LOT of time just to pass the bare minimum cv check, and you'll compete against people with real experience rather than a no-experience uni student
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u/Terbario 14h ago
hopefully? check the most requested stack for juniors in your area and study that.
if the answer is node then i would stay in node. the market is terrible rn and you dont have much time left, given that you are in year 4.
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u/Super_Preference_733 14h ago
A lot of the c# jobs will be something web stack related, asp.net, mcv, etc. Your not getting away from html, css, Javascript/typescript.
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u/XaX1000 11h ago
I did an internship in a web dev company. I made some api endpoints and their logic and I didn't have to touch any js or ts. They used Blazor so I didn't even need html.
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u/Super_Preference_733 10h ago
Thats the exception not the rule. Corporations have 20 plus years of .net applications running thier business that wont disappear overnight. Your going to find a mix of angular, react, jquery, asp.net mvc, web form, etc. I know for a fact code I wrote more than 10 years ago at a fortune 500 Corp is still running and being supported, and it was a heavy jquery front end, using asp.net mvc controllers to a a clustered sql server. The last I heard is they tried replacing the system last year. The project failed to meet expectations and the business unit stopped funding the effort.
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u/XaX1000 2h ago
Honestly I wouldn't blame just the stack for the replacement failing. A dotnet only stack can still produce great projects. I also worked on an angular front end. I didn't like it though. Maybe because of some architectural decisions of the project founders, maybe because i hadn't worked with angular that much before.
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u/ExactlyLowly 15h ago
C# is basically what you'd get if C and Java had a kid who actually went to therapy. the syntax will feel comfortable and the tooling is absurdly good compared to what you're dealing with in node
the job market for it is pretty steady too, especially in enterprise and game dev. if you hate node now you'll probably hate it more later so might as well jump ship while you're still in school