C# and Azure aren’t just tools; they’re institutional gravity wells. This essay examines how enterprise procurement psychology, stack complexity, and economic capture patterns shape developer culture, delivery speed, and technical decision-making. The question isn’t whether C# works. It’s whether it optimises for craft or for compliance.

Contents

1. Introduction: Suck Satan’s Cock

Back in the day, there was a phrase that floated around procurement departments like gospel: “No one ever got fired for buying IBM.” It wasn’t praise. It was insulation. IBM was the safe choice. The universal choice. The monopoly choice. You bought IBM not because it was elegant or innovative, but because it was defensible. It was institutionally unassailable. It was the brand you could point at when something went wrong and say, “Well, everyone uses it.”

That logic never died. It just reincarnated.

Now it’s Azure. Now it’s Microsoft. “We already run identity there.” “Our whole stack integrates with it.” “It’s enterprise-grade.” The language is identical. The psychology is identical. The decision isn’t about technical merit; it’s about career risk minimisation. It’s about conformity as insurance. Bill Hicks would have looked at the whole thing and laughed, saying, “You suck Satan’s cock”, because the transaction isn’t technical, it’s spiritual. You’re not choosing a tool. You’re pledging allegiance.

And yes, I can already hear someone groaning, “Oh my god, is he still going on about how shit the Microsoft stack is?” Yes. Yes, I am. Because it’s still shit.

And that’s where C# lives.

2. Who Exactly “LIKES” C#

There is a particular personality type that gravitates toward C#. Not the curious builder. Not the language aesthete. Not the person who cares about computation as a craft. The gravitational pull of C# is toward the compliant careerist: the individual who wants to plug themselves into the warm, humming carcass of the enterprise machine and extract a salary in exchange for obedience. If you want to suck enterprise cock for cash, C# is your lingua franca.

That’s not an aesthetic judgment. It’s a structural one.

And no, not every C# developer is a compliant careerist… but the ecosystem overwhelmingly rewards the ones who are.

C# is not merely a programming language. It is a crystallisation of enterprise ideology. It encodes, in syntax and ecosystem, a worldview: abstraction layered upon abstraction, configuration atop configuration, ceremony mistaken for rigour, and tooling so bloated it becomes a theology of its own inevitability.

3. C# as the Bureaucrat of Languages

At a purely linguistic level, C# is the bureaucrat of languages. It is verbose in the way committee documents are verbose. Every operation is wrapped in types, attributes, annotations, frameworks, dependency injection containers, service registries, configuration providers, logging pipelines, middleware chains, and extension methods whose only purpose is to make the ceremony look sophisticated. You don’t write code in C#. You negotiate with it.

The defenders will say: “But it’s powerful. It’s mature. It’s structured.” Yes. So is a tax code. So is a military procurement process. So is SAP.

4. The Stack Eats the Developer

The problem is not that C# cannot express computation. It can. The problem is that it cannot express computation without dragging the entire enterprise ontology behind it like a corpse tied to your ankle.

Consider the modern .NET stack. To build even a modest web service, you are immediately subsumed into ASP.NET Core, middleware pipelines, dependency injection scaffolding, configuration hierarchies, environment profiles, launch settings, project files, solution files, MSBuild incantations, and NuGet dependency graphs that resemble a fungal bloom. Your code is never just your code. It is always already inside the machine.

Contrast this with languages and ecosystems designed around velocity and clarity. Go: single binary, minimal dependencies, fast compile times, structural simplicity. Rust: brutal honesty about memory and ownership, explicitness without ceremony. Even Node.js, chaotic as it can be, allows for direct expression. You write code. It runs. The feedback loop is tight.

C#? You wait. You restore packages. You rebuild the solution. You watch Visual Studio churn like a Victorian steam engine trying to achieve orbit.

Yes, yes, I know. “.NET 10 is fast now.” Fantastic. Standing ovation. They finally made it feel like a modern platform in 2025. It only took two decades of enterprise money and developer suffering to get there. But the speed of the runtime is not the speed of delivery, and that’s the part the Microsoft faithful never seem to understand. The point is that the enterprise ecosystem still optimises for ceremony, not speed.

5. Azure: The Compliance Labyrinth

And then there is Azure.

Before the consultants jump in: yes, I know, “nobody serious uses the Azure Portal, you use Terraform”. Exactly. That’s not a defence, it’s a confession. When the official UI for your cloud is so slow and incoherent that the correct professional move is to pretend it doesn’t exist, you don’t have a platform. You have a compliance maze with an API.

Azure is not a cloud platform; it is an obstacle course designed by committee. The UI is an ever-shifting labyrinth of “blades” and panels and hidden submenus. Resource groups nested within subscriptions nested within tenants nested within policies nested within role assignments nested within service principals. It is a hierarchy of indirection that makes medieval feudalism look elegant.

Deployment in Azure is not a matter of shipping software. It is an exercise in ritual compliance. ARM templates. Bicep files. YAML pipelines. Service connections. Managed identities. Networking rules. Private endpoints. And every one of these layers exists not to simplify your work but to ensure that your work must pass through governance chokepoints designed for the comfort of enterprise risk officers, all the while tying you into the byzantine Azure “stack”.

What finally broke me wasn’t C#. it was Azure. Not the syntax. The choreography. You request PIM. You wait. You get the wrong access. You wait again. You spin up a cluster. You wait. Portal. Blade. Select an option. Wait for it to load. Hidden pane. Wait for it to load again. Pipeline. YAML. Service connection. Managed identity. Policy. Networking rule you didn’t know existed. By the time you’re back in your editor, the thought is dead. The feedback loop isn’t slow. It’s severed. Context-switching becomes the work. Building software becomes clerical labour under fluorescent light. I have never felt “code versus convention” so physically. The machine steps between intention and execution and calls it maturity. The drag isn’t accidental. It’s the system. And the system is fucked.

6. Latency, But Make It Cognitive

The result is latency, not just computational latency, but cognitive latency.

Azure is slow as fuck, not only in its sometimes glacial portal performance, but in its operational philosophy. Every change must propagate through dashboards, deployments, pipelines, and approvals. Every action is mediated. Every experiment is taxed. The developer is not empowered; the developer is contained.

C# fits this ecosystem perfectly because it was born for it. It is procedural in spirit even when wearing object-oriented clothing. It encourages architecture astronauts: interfaces for everything, factories for factories, abstractions layered so thick that the underlying behaviour becomes archaeological. It rewards people who enjoy drawing UML diagrams more than shipping features.

In theory, modern C# has acquired functional features, LINQ, pattern matching, records, async/await. But these are grafts. They do not change the underlying cultural gravity. The gravitational centre is still the enterprise application: the CRUD service backed by SQL Server, fronted by a load balancer, wrapped in layers of compliance theatre.

The true anti-pattern is not any specific language feature. It is the mindset embedded in the stack. The assumption that complexity equals seriousness. That abstraction equals maturity. That friction equals robustness. This is the lie.

7. The Feedback Loop is the Product

If your goal is to deliver quickly with better tools, you optimise for feedback loops. You optimise for clarity. You minimise compile times, deployment friction, and cognitive overhead. You choose ecosystems where the default path is the shortest path from idea to running system.

If you actually care about time-to-delivery, Ruby on Rails should make the entire C#/Azure stack feel like a moral failure. Rails optimises for shipping. Convention over configuration is not a slogan; it is an economic weapon. You scaffold, you migrate, you deploy, you iterate, in hours, not procurement cycles. The feedback loop is tight, the abstractions are humane, and the path from idea to running system is brutally short. The delta in delivery speed is not marginal; it is categorical. Rails is optimised for building things. C# in Azure is optimised for documenting why you’re allowed to.

In the C#/Azure world, the default path is never the shortest path. It is the sanctioned path. The path that integrates with identity providers, policy engines, logging backends, monitoring dashboards, security baselines, and cost management tooling, before you have even validated whether the idea should exist.

8. Innovation as a Capture Mechanism

This is not accidental. It is economically aligned. C# and Azure are symbiotic revenue engines. The friction is not a bug; it is a feature. The more you entangle yourself in the stack, the higher the switching cost. The deeper the dependency graph, the more institutional inertia forms around it. The more you internalise its patterns, the more employable you become, not as a creator, but as a maintainer of enterprise sprawl.

Even Azure’s supposed “innovation” is frequently imported from third parties. Databricks becomes successful on Azure, so Microsoft embraces it, monetises it, and then attempts to absorb and replicate it through something like Fabric, a product that feels less like an invention and more like corporate mimicry with worse ergonomics. The pattern is consistent: let someone else prove the model, then wrap it in enterprise packaging and sell it back to the same captive audience. Innovation happens at the edges; Azure’s contribution is to standardise, bureaucratise, and tax it.

9. The Enterprise Gravity Well

And so the pipeline continues. Graduates learn C# not because it is beautiful, but because it is safe. Because job listings demand it. Because corporations run on it. Because the enterprise will always need another pair of hands to massage its dependency injection container.

You can make money this way. Absolutely. You can have a stable career polishing the brass fittings on a bloated monolith.

But let’s not pretend this is about technical excellence.

If you care about programming as a discipline, about elegance, performance, expressive power, tight loops between thought and execution, then C# inside Azure feels like coding through wet cement. Every keystroke echoes with governance. Every deployment drips with ceremony.

There are domains where C# is adequate. Game development with Unity. Certain Windows-native integrations. Legacy systems that will outlive us all. But as a first-principles choice for building modern systems quickly and well? It is rarely optimal.

10. Conclusion: Machine vs Craft

The real tragedy is not that C# is bad in some absolute sense. It is that it trains you to accept unnecessary weight as normal. It normalises the idea that complexity is the cost of doing business. That slowness is inevitable. That multi-minute builds, labyrinthine cloud consoles, and YAML incantations are just the price of adulthood.

They’re not.

They are artefacts of a specific economic and organisational structure: the enterprise. And C# is its sacramental language.

If that’s the life you want, stable, bureaucratically insulated, compliant, then by all means, learn C#. Learn Azure. Learn to navigate the cathedral of middleware and policy. You will be rewarded.

But don’t confuse that reward with technical virtue.

And don’t mistake the machine for the craft.

Azure is where software developers go to die… slowly, one permission request at a time, converting motivation to exhaustion without ever passing “Go!”.