As for Open Source, I’m such a stubbornly independent dude I can usually work around problems I encounter w/out too much time or trouble. When that fails, I almost always have found a helping hand as many Open source projects have rich communities. Also there’s always Red Hat if you want the support for Linux.

But enough of that, this is BrentO’s blog, not the open source religious war forum (although I did find the quote funny).

SDC – because I don’t want to learn a language that doesn’t make me *more* valuable in my career. If I learn PowerShell, I can administer…file servers. (I’m exaggerating here, but you get the point.) If I learn, say, C#, I can build something that I can sell to somebody else, or at least build something that sells for money. People won’t be delivering entire products built start-to-finish on PowerShell that sell for a lot of money. It comes down to an opportunity cost: how much am I personally going to make by learning PowerShell, versus another product. The guys learning PowerShell right now are really excited because it makes them better sysadmins, but that’s about the last direction I want to take my career, second only to better TPS reporter.

I can totally understand why sysadmins want to learn it, though, and why junior guys want to learn it. It does make them incrementally more valuable – but not order-of-magnitude more valuable. It makes their job order-of-magnitude easier – but doesn’t increase their salary likewise. That’s where they lose focus.

Personally since I had an interest in learning Python, and it’s useful on multiple platforms, not just Windows (and furthermore gives those who want it access to the .Net world via IronPython), I’ve decided to develop my knowledge there rather than dilettanting it across every language in the world (tempting as that is), but like I said, I’m curious as to why you aren’t that interested (I’m interested in your lack of interest).

Oh god, I just sounded like a manager.