I wrote (C#) desktop apps for several years that did manufacturing QA analytics. We went the desktop route because 1) UI development was faster for us (C# vs. jQuery) and 2) Users wanted to interact with Excel in real time (e.g. export).
My experience when I went to look for a job was that I got about 10 interviews and was turned down for all of them because I didn't know about JavaScript, Distributed systems (e.g. load balancers, HTTP caching), WebSockets, deployment pipelines, web services, etc. Don't get my wrong I spent a lot of time reading about all these types of things but until I built an actual API/website it was hard to answer questions about them.
My experience when I went to look for a job was that I got about 10 interviews and was turned down for all of them because I didn't know about JavaScript, Distributed systems (e.g. load balancers, HTTP caching), WebSockets, deployment pipelines, web services, etc. Don't get my wrong I spent a lot of time reading about all these types of things but until I built an actual API/website it was hard to answer questions about them.