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In addition to be a full-time CTO, I run a referral network that helps connect high-quality engineers with great job opportunities whilst skipping bullshit inte

In addition to be a full-time CTO, I run a referral network that helps connect high-quality engineers with great job opportunities whilst skipping bullshit interview processes. I can attest that the demand of Rails engineers is still large - why wouldn't it be? It isn't like the 15+ years of Rails code in the world just converted itself to another language. But I will tell you one trend that I find very interesting and did not think I'd ever see: The lead-in for a full stack or even a backend position is the React/Redux part, not the backend technology. Very often a position will be React + whatever you can do on the backend. For years, it was quite the opposite. You wanted to hire a Rails engineer who would dabble on the frontend where need be. A lot companies I work will pay handsomely for a React developer, and they're quite sure they can teach the React developer whatever backend they use (usually Rails, Django, Flask, Sinatra -- in that order).

kwillets 8y ago
The last team I worked with seemed to be going that way. I'm an old-school database engineer, and RoR had a familiar feel as I was learning it, since it got a lot of the database interface right, but my manager was a blame-the-tools type. To me our app just needed a few tweaks for performance and some refactoring of a few poorly-designed classes which were obvious in the data model, but to him it needed React, .net microservices, and a whole lot of yes-men to implement these things. This kind of culture has always been around since way before Rails; unfortunately I've never learned how to turn it around. The team no longer has a database engineer :).
khalilravanna 8y ago
The note about the frontend tech taking the priority when looking at candidates is super interesting to me. Especially as someone whose forte is on the frontend side of things and who definitively struggles more with the backend. I wonder if this speaks to the relative scarcity of developers with that frontend experience or whether frontend technology is actually harder to learn. Can you speak to that at all from your experience? I'm especially interested as someone who's growing our own engineering teams and laser focused on getting people who can really crush it on the backend out of the gate (because I feel like we can teach the frontend pretty well).
blain_the_train 8y ago
Because the front end we ecosystem is such a mess that it's the biggest pain point?

kwillets 8y ago

The last team I worked with seemed to be going that way. I'm an old-school database engineer, and RoR had a familiar feel as I was learning it, since it got a lot of the database interface right, but my manager was a blame-the-tools type. To me our app just needed a few tweaks for performance and some refactoring of a few poorly-designed classes which were obvious in the data model, but to him it needed React, .net microservices, and a whole lot of yes-men to implement these things. This kind of culture has always been around since way before Rails; unfortunately I've never learned how to turn it around. The team no longer has a database engineer :).

khalilravanna 8y ago

The note about the frontend tech taking the priority when looking at candidates is super interesting to me. Especially as someone whose forte is on the frontend side of things and who definitively struggles more with the backend. I wonder if this speaks to the relative scarcity of developers with that frontend experience or whether frontend technology is actually harder to learn. Can you speak to that at all from your experience? I'm especially interested as someone who's growing our own engineering teams and laser focused on getting people who can really crush it on the backend out of the gate (because I feel like we can teach the frontend pretty well).

blain_the_train 8y ago

Because the front end we ecosystem is such a mess that it's the biggest pain point?