I feel like he is both right and wrong, and for all the wrong reasons.
His hunch is that for the most part .Net developers are bad, and by and large I agree with that. Because .Net is used in a lot of Enterprisey places, and it's so easy to get a job in it right out of school you find a lot of just horrible code, and broken mindsets about programming in general. All of the idiocy I find in .Net is usually just someone who wouldn't know how to solve their problem in any other programming language either.
But he's wrong that that is a direct result of .Net in general. I feel you could swap out .Net for Rails: "oh all you know is how to run `rails g scaffold` therefore you're not worth my time". That is wrong. Like Rails, .Net provides abstractions over mechanics, but you will be a happier, more confident programmer when you can understand the intent of those abstractions, and maybe even take a theoretical stab at how you would implement it. That goes for any platform you develop on.
Personally I think I've grown a lot as a developer in general over the past few years using .Net professionally. Despite the stigma I've met a lot of smart developers, and C# has helped me hone how I like to think about and solve problems in general. I'm sure it helps that I do a healthy amount of other hacking outside of it all to give me perspective, but I certainly don't feel stupider for being exposed to things like LINQ, which helped my grok Monads and embrace more Composition style programming in a fuller way.
His hunch is that for the most part .Net developers are bad, and by and large I agree with that. Because .Net is used in a lot of Enterprisey places, and it's so easy to get a job in it right out of school you find a lot of just horrible code, and broken mindsets about programming in general. All of the idiocy I find in .Net is usually just someone who wouldn't know how to solve their problem in any other programming language either.
But he's wrong that that is a direct result of .Net in general. I feel you could swap out .Net for Rails: "oh all you know is how to run `rails g scaffold` therefore you're not worth my time". That is wrong. Like Rails, .Net provides abstractions over mechanics, but you will be a happier, more confident programmer when you can understand the intent of those abstractions, and maybe even take a theoretical stab at how you would implement it. That goes for any platform you develop on.
Personally I think I've grown a lot as a developer in general over the past few years using .Net professionally. Despite the stigma I've met a lot of smart developers, and C# has helped me hone how I like to think about and solve problems in general. I'm sure it helps that I do a healthy amount of other hacking outside of it all to give me perspective, but I certainly don't feel stupider for being exposed to things like LINQ, which helped my grok Monads and embrace more Composition style programming in a fuller way.