What is your opinion?

[StrangerInBeijing]

I have to make the most difficult decision here (feels like it) and although I already made up my mind, I thought I’m going to post this one, and give it a day and sleep on this.



OK. Lemme give you some background:



Coming from a typical western country where MS dominates. Started out in VB6, moved on to VB.Net, and just started to get along nicely. Never worked on anything else … only MS products and technologies. Down south ppl talk about opensource as if it some crazy idea to bypass MS, and will never work.



Moved to Asian country, and started job hunting. Oh hell, seems my VB.Net is useless, and even C# would have helped me nothing. Nearly a month later everything start happening at the speed of light. Really, this is from Friday to Monday!!!



Got 2 offers: (real offers, not possible offers)



(1) A company willing to invest in me by employing me and giving me the time and resources needed to learn Python (Java later), work on stuff like Linux, Apache, and some other….complete new world, all in open source. Great people, small, but really promising looking company.



(2) Offer to WORK AT MICROSOFT!!! Yeah dude, I’ve been for an interview at MS, and after a grueling interview (not programming wise, more I had to convince them the culture difference between me and my co-workers will not be a problem) I heard this morning I was accepted. This will be about automating some MS product using C# (dunno how confidential it is, so will leave out the details).



So what I do now? Get to learn a whole new world of software development (opensource) and stax of new stuff, or get to learn some C#, but at MS.



Pay, benefits, etc are all the same. In my mind…opensource. Actually already made up my mind, as I wanted to do it for a long time, but where I come from…huh uh.



What do you think?