10 ms·

yet ruby on rails and ruby is in decline. its getting harder to hire younger developers in this field, many don't even know what Ruby is or cares for it. Seems

yet ruby on rails and ruby is in decline. its getting harder to hire younger developers in this field, many don't even know what Ruby is or cares for it. Seems like its another PHP type of situation, one which companies will move away from in the coming years. Not the fault of the ecosystem or language but simply because it gets expensive and the talent pool shrinks, not a good driver for business decision makers to back. edit: i really dont understand the downvotes here I am simply mentioning the changing requirements in many companies that used to be on RoR that cannot find enough senior developers with the budget they are used to, to the point that they are moving to a new platform. theres just not enough RoR jobs and not enough RoR senior devs in the marketplace today and it will be far more bleak in the near future. there's not a lot of new minds coming into RoR and thats the talent pool you are gonna be stuck with if you keep the trajectory. Ask any new graduate and what tech stack language they are using, I'm willing to bet it isn't Ruby or RoR. Their attention is in Javascript or Python or more niche languages like Rust/Elixir/Clojure

thallium205 4y ago
If it's not the fault of the ecosystem or the language then why is it in decline?
- ezekiel11 4y ago
  attention is in decline. developers are paying more attention to other languages that yields greater number of employment options. it should be that RoR devs get increasing rates as they become rarer but its not, demand is also dwindling as enterprises feel uneasy about banking the future on a smaller talent pool.
  - mediaman 4y ago
    Why is Rails in decline? I see a lot of people say they're developing instead with rust, or python, or javascript. But Rust has little to do with what Ruby/Rails is used for, and Python is mostly used in other fields also (it's not like Django is taking over the world). Every time I look at the various JS frameworks it seems like just a huge lift to get something going versus Rails, for typical SME type business problems. Most problems don't really seem to require SPA. Things like Elixir/Phoenix look very interesting and promising, but their ecosystem is (for now) much smaller. And just the size of the Elixir community right now suggests that it's not like all the RoR developers went to Elixir. So what is the thing that is so much more attractive than Rails, to solve your everyday business logic issues for small to medium scale problems? Does all engineers and companies think they are solving Google-scale problems or something? I feel like I'm missing something obvious.
    - ezekiel11 4y ago
      Your observation is correct but its that companies can't hire like they used to when RoR was at its peak. Like I said, unless you have growing revenues to continue to retain senior talent, its going to be tough in the future as there is no continued queue of talent making it through the pipelines. Maybe one day RoR will become the Java EE and will rely on a very limited pool of workers, and that is the situation that many are trying to correct. You absolutely need to pay attention to what the new generation of developers are learning in order to suppress wages, failure to do so without consistent revenue growth you introduce issues that will seep into your business, especially if you rely on being online.
    - mr_ruby_man 4y ago
      As an ex-Ruby dev, I don't need an ORM, I don't need ActiveRecord, and I don't need MVC. I want the framework to be out of my way, which is what FastAPI and ExpressJS provide. Ruby itself isn't attractive, as a scripting/dynamic language it's worse than Python, therefore no point in using it. Keep in mind, I don't like Python either, that's why you can trust my opinion since I don't have bias for either or.
- notpachet 4y ago
  I actually think it's both. The language: Tech companies are becoming more aware of the dangers posed by maintaining and updating large codebases written in an untyped language. I know there's a lot of work still being done in Rubyland on this problem but it feels like the horse left the barn long ago. A lot of Rubyists seem aesthetically opposed to types, including influential language stewards. Sorbet is arguably the Typescript of Rubyland, but it doesn't feel like it's taking off to nearly the same degree. (My theory is that the expressiveness required to support a language as flexible as Ruby results in poor developer ergonomics in terms of the necessary type annotations.) The ecosystem: Rails is still king, for better and for worse. Back when Rails was in its prime, there weren't as many CRUD web use cases that required marshalling lots of async i/o. Now it's a pretty ubiquitous requirement. You need to fetch data from upstream A and upstream B, then combine them to send back to the client. With Rails, the de facto way to do this is to make these requests serially, which isn't very scalable. Hell, even a single call to a slow remote host can easily end up saturating all of your web workers. Like the types issue, there's a lot of work happening trying to make it easier to perform non-blocking i/o in Ruby/Rails, but it seems like too little too late.
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    To wit, a personal anecdote: My tiny company is torn between throwing out our ruby code and trying to hire more ruby developers. Our senior ruby guy is leaving, and the one senior candidate we had accepted, then later rejected, our offer. Of the other interviews we have had, candidates were asking for too much (i.e. over $200k base salary) and often barely qualified as a senior, or were simply too inexperienced to replace the person who was leaving. I'm about one more round of interviews from throwing in the towel and doing a hulkamania hackathon in a new language. The existing code really isn't great either (deprecated gems, lots of accidental complexity, etc) so it is almost tempting to think it would work.
    - ezekiel11 4y ago
    - notpachet 4y ago
- adverbly 4y ago
  Same thing happening to Java. Lack of a strong enough pull to get people into it. If you are learning something new or just graduating, you're way more likely to learn rust/python/javascript as those languages offer something unique (low level speed/machine learning/browser stuff). Rails used to be miles ahead of the competition, but the competition has largely caught up. Rails is still probably the best choice(in my opinion at least) for building a feature-rich webapp backend quickly unless you've got some crazy unrealistic performance requirements(spoiler: most engineers love to pretend they do, but they probably don't) But these days there are frameworks everywhere so you can write your backend in whatever you're most comfortable with.
tomc1985 4y ago
There are plenty of experienced Rails devs out there. They don't need to be younger.
- ezekiel11 4y ago
  I don't think you understood what I wrote.
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    What's the relevance of anyone's age?
LAC-Tech 4y ago
shrugs rails is not hot anymore but I don't see ruby going anywhere. It's still the best thing out there for scripting.

thallium205 4y ago

If it's not the fault of the ecosystem or the language then why is it in decline?

ezekiel11 4y ago
attention is in decline. developers are paying more attention to other languages that yields greater number of employment options. it should be that RoR devs get increasing rates as they become rarer but its not, demand is also dwindling as enterprises feel uneasy about banking the future on a smaller talent pool.
- mediaman 4y ago
  Why is Rails in decline? I see a lot of people say they're developing instead with rust, or python, or javascript. But Rust has little to do with what Ruby/Rails is used for, and Python is mostly used in other fields also (it's not like Django is taking over the world). Every time I look at the various JS frameworks it seems like just a huge lift to get something going versus Rails, for typical SME type business problems. Most problems don't really seem to require SPA. Things like Elixir/Phoenix look very interesting and promising, but their ecosystem is (for now) much smaller. And just the size of the Elixir community right now suggests that it's not like all the RoR developers went to Elixir. So what is the thing that is so much more attractive than Rails, to solve your everyday business logic issues for small to medium scale problems? Does all engineers and companies think they are solving Google-scale problems or something? I feel like I'm missing something obvious.
  - ezekiel11 4y ago
    Your observation is correct but its that companies can't hire like they used to when RoR was at its peak. Like I said, unless you have growing revenues to continue to retain senior talent, its going to be tough in the future as there is no continued queue of talent making it through the pipelines. Maybe one day RoR will become the Java EE and will rely on a very limited pool of workers, and that is the situation that many are trying to correct. You absolutely need to pay attention to what the new generation of developers are learning in order to suppress wages, failure to do so without consistent revenue growth you introduce issues that will seep into your business, especially if you rely on being online.
  - mr_ruby_man 4y ago
    As an ex-Ruby dev, I don't need an ORM, I don't need ActiveRecord, and I don't need MVC. I want the framework to be out of my way, which is what FastAPI and ExpressJS provide. Ruby itself isn't attractive, as a scripting/dynamic language it's worse than Python, therefore no point in using it. Keep in mind, I don't like Python either, that's why you can trust my opinion since I don't have bias for either or.
notpachet 4y ago
I actually think it's both. The language: Tech companies are becoming more aware of the dangers posed by maintaining and updating large codebases written in an untyped language. I know there's a lot of work still being done in Rubyland on this problem but it feels like the horse left the barn long ago. A lot of Rubyists seem aesthetically opposed to types, including influential language stewards. Sorbet is arguably the Typescript of Rubyland, but it doesn't feel like it's taking off to nearly the same degree. (My theory is that the expressiveness required to support a language as flexible as Ruby results in poor developer ergonomics in terms of the necessary type annotations.) The ecosystem: Rails is still king, for better and for worse. Back when Rails was in its prime, there weren't as many CRUD web use cases that required marshalling lots of async i/o. Now it's a pretty ubiquitous requirement. You need to fetch data from upstream A and upstream B, then combine them to send back to the client. With Rails, the de facto way to do this is to make these requests serially, which isn't very scalable. Hell, even a single call to a slow remote host can easily end up saturating all of your web workers. Like the types issue, there's a lot of work happening trying to make it easier to perform non-blocking i/o in Ruby/Rails, but it seems like too little too late.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  To wit, a personal anecdote: My tiny company is torn between throwing out our ruby code and trying to hire more ruby developers. Our senior ruby guy is leaving, and the one senior candidate we had accepted, then later rejected, our offer. Of the other interviews we have had, candidates were asking for too much (i.e. over $200k base salary) and often barely qualified as a senior, or were simply too inexperienced to replace the person who was leaving. I'm about one more round of interviews from throwing in the towel and doing a hulkamania hackathon in a new language. The existing code really isn't great either (deprecated gems, lots of accidental complexity, etc) so it is almost tempting to think it would work.
  - ezekiel11 4y ago
  - notpachet 4y ago
adverbly 4y ago
Same thing happening to Java. Lack of a strong enough pull to get people into it. If you are learning something new or just graduating, you're way more likely to learn rust/python/javascript as those languages offer something unique (low level speed/machine learning/browser stuff). Rails used to be miles ahead of the competition, but the competition has largely caught up. Rails is still probably the best choice(in my opinion at least) for building a feature-rich webapp backend quickly unless you've got some crazy unrealistic performance requirements(spoiler: most engineers love to pretend they do, but they probably don't) But these days there are frameworks everywhere so you can write your backend in whatever you're most comfortable with.

tomc1985 4y ago

There are plenty of experienced Rails devs out there. They don't need to be younger.

ezekiel11 4y ago
I don't think you understood what I wrote.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  What's the relevance of anyone's age?

LAC-Tech 4y ago

shrugs rails is not hot anymore but I don't see ruby going anywhere. It's still the best thing out there for scripting.