Software companies come in many sizes. There are small startups, medium-sized companies, and huge enterprises. As you might expect, startups are usually lean and fast. Big companies that develop large applications move much more slowly. Those might be systems developed for many years or decades by hundreds of developers. I’m talking about products like the Amazon marketplace, AutoCAD, or any operating system. These products take a very long time to release new features or fix bugs, considering the amount of engineers they employ.

Node.js is probably the most popular backend technology in the industry. Companies like Twitter, LinkedIn, Uber, and many others use Node.js as their primary server technology or combine it with other languages. It has a lot of things going for it like a huge community, a great ecosystem, and it uses the same language in the front end and back end. Since C# and .NET are my main programming languages, I’m trying to figure out if I’m using an underrated technology or if the market trend has a point.

I’ve been a .NET software developer for my entire career, and I love it. I love the C# language, the productivity of the platform, and the ecosystem. But I’ve been dealing with an existential crisis for years now. I see how companies, especially startups, don’t seem to choose .NET as their platform of choice. That role seems to be reserved to Node.js in recent years [1] [2] [3] . Over the last few years, I got to work with Node.

I’m sure every software engineer with a long career had this dilemma: Should I join a startup or a big corporation? It’s a good question since your professional development, the working conditions, life-work balance, and career development will be very different according to the choice you make. There are many differences between a small company and a big company and it’s important to understand them in order to make the right decision for you.

Did you hear about stackshare ? It’s a pretty neat website that I recently discovered. The idea is that you can search for any tech company, and see their technology stack. For example, here is Airbnb’s: So the first interesting thing that came to mind was checking out what the most successful startups are using. I used this list of “successful startups”, in addition to angel.co startup database. After looking at about 100 startups, I ended up with data from 23.