So it came out today that the company that screwed up the appliance rebates in Texas this week had already screwed up in two other states.

But there should have been one big warning sign before that. The fact the firm handling the rebates was using .Net.

Now there are definitely good programmers working in .Net. And you can definitely built working websites with it. I’ve heard from good programmers who’ve done it. But it’s not where the energy is, and .Net seems to be drawing the unemployables. The programmers who can’t get a job anywhere else. The money is in Java. And the excitement is in Ruby, Python, and PHP. .Net positions exist… for other reasons.

And this was pretty obvious when under load they didn’t immediately remove images and other externally loaded static resources. This group didn’t even have the most basic of solutions to the problem in their toolkit.

So while it’s possible that firm you’ve hired that wants to develop in .Net is competent and has some fantastic programmers, chances are that it’s not. And it doesn’t.