"Genius" may be overstating things a bit especially now that Rails has gotten pretty popular. You do find some people in the Rails world who are a lot like PHP

"Genius" may be overstating things a bit especially now that Rails has gotten pretty popular. You do find some people in the Rails world who are a lot like PHP programmers[0] these days, and you do need to take care to weed those out. That said, you'll probably have to do a lot less weeding out to find somebody to work on a Ruby project than a .NET, Java or PHP project. [0] In this context, a "PHP programmer" is not simply a programmer who uses PHP, but a programmer who uses only PHP and is almost certainly clueless about CS fundamentals.