Are you a newbie programmer looking for a job? It seems your best bet is to opt for .NET.

According to technical jobs website, Dice.com, companies in the US have posted more than 10,000 positions requesting .NET experience - a 25 percent increase compared to last year's .NET job count.

Alice Hill, managing director at Dice.com, describes Microsoft .NET  as, "the technology developers love to hate" explaining their antipathy to it on two grounds.

Firstly developers fear that if they specialize in .NET application development they will not be able to easily branch out to other platforms. Secondly, she refers to a "money gap" pointing to the fact that  professionals who regularly develop for .NET earn about $83,000 a year, as compared to more than $91,000 for those specializing in Java.In this respect she anticipates a change based on simple economics: if demand continues to outstrip supply, wages will adjust.

The interesting observation made in the Dice report Shortage is while recruiters generally seek out mid-career candidates,  27 percent of searches in the Dice resume database that included both .NET and years of experience were for those three years or less  experience, as shown in the following chart based on Dice.com resume database searches during September 2011:

Alice Hill has two pieces of advice:

• if novices are looking to break into the tech industry, .NET, which is a relatively straightforward framework to learn is  an accessible entry point.
• as regards to money, negotiate hard at the outset of a new job, because that initial salary may set the base for the next three years.

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