Today, Jian Shuo Wang wrote in his email to friends:
This is the best article on Microsoft I have ever seen in the last few years. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html What Joe said is so true. Share with you.
"And here's the clincher: I noticed (and confirmed this with a recruiter friend) that Windows API programmers here in New York City who know C++ and COM programming earn about $130,000 a year, while typical Web programmers using managed code languages (Java, PHP, Perl, even ASP.NET) earn about $80,000 a year. That's a huge difference, and when I talked to some friends from Microsoft Consulting Services about this they admitted that Microsoft had lost a whole generation of developers. The reason it takes $130,000 to hire someone with COM experience is because nobody bothered learning COM programming in the last eight years or so, so you have to find somebody really senior, usually they're already in management, and convince them to take a job as a grunt programmer, dealing with (God help me) marshalling and monikers and apartment threading and aggregates and tearoffs and a million other things that, basically, only Don Box ever understood, and even Don Box can't bear to look at them any more."
I started to pick up some book with COM and VC++ and found it was long time ago when people really care about marshalling and monikers…… What do you think?
Regards
Jian Shuo Wang
I replied:
Today, few people are still programming Assembler. Few people build circuits with diodes and triodes. It's a good thing that complexity was hidden by much higher level programming language and building block. So that we can be focused more on realize the business value. Don't be too sad like Joel. Such sad mood is just sort of missing the golden age. Tomorrow is another day.
-eric
Share those thoughts with my blog readers.