11 ms·

Are Ruby on Rails positions still pretty popular?

iimblack 2y ago
In my job search for remote USA roles it seems a little less popular than Django just bolstered by the GitHub and Shopify postings. Node, dotnet, go, and Java all seem more popular.
Lio 2y ago
Yes, it's popular enough that you can find work pretty easily. There's less openings than for JS, Java or C# but then there are less Ruby developers. That's the same as it ever was.
zdragnar 2y ago
Trying to hire for it has been deeply unpleasant. Very few people actually have the experience they claim to have, and asking them basic programming questions that any senior developer should be able to talk about has roughly 80% of the candidates going straight to chatgpt and pretending the answer is theirs. I'm not talking leetcode stuff either, more like "what is polymorphism" or "what is refactoring". Maybe the whole industry has gone that way... but the smaller talent pool makes it a lot more obvious. Were it up to me, we would be using something else where I work, and not just because of the smaller talent pool (although that's probably the biggest reason). Many of the "delightful" and time saving things about rails either turn out to have relatively insignificant impacts for complex applications, or turn into sharp edges that slow us down.
- 1123581321 2y ago
  For experienced developers, it helps a lot to know the names of companies that use Rails. Every time you see an unfamiliar company, learn a bit about how they used Rails, through the interview, if nothing else is available. We're to the point where we can ask nearly anyone fairly specific questions about their contributions depending on the history we see on the resume. (I am not saying to avoid talking to people if you don't recognize the company.)
- aantix 2y ago
  If I had to guess from postings on Twitter and Linkedin, I think hiring is taking everyone by surprise. I remember a Linkedin comment talking about how the company received 1,000+ applicants for a single dev job. Some blame the layoffs. I don't think so. Before GPT, it was a struggle for devs to appear articulate in the domains that they reference on their resume. Possessing exceptional writing abilities was a definitive competitive advantage. It's no longer. Now everyone can sound like an expert and craft a pretty good, customized, concise cover letter. The whole process needs to move to video-based cover letters. It's as simple as that.
  - krainboltgreene 2y ago
    > Now everyone can sound like an expert and craft a pretty good, customized, concise cover letter. Zero content coming from LLM's sounds like this and yes I've read quite a bit of output from a variety of them (including whatever version/release the reply is going to ask).
    - aantix 2y ago
      You probably have already read several cover letters from GPT that you didn't realize were programmatically generated.
      - krainboltgreene 2y ago
        I sincerely doubt that. Every one has been sharply obvious. I've also asked candidates after the fact and they were open about when they were/weren't. I haven't been wrong yet. There's this idea that LLM content is subversively good enough to pass muster, but ultimately if there's more than 3 sentences, it's not and you can ask any content moderator (Like publishing companies).
  - datascienced 2y ago
    We are 1-2 years from chatgpt being able to fool interviewers. I mean speed, latency, audio generation and processing. Just connect your camera to the AI you and get your smart double to take the interview. “Are you a bot” is going to be a question and they are hoping the AI safety people will make it answer correctly.
- itake 2y ago
  Ex-ruby on rails dev here, the RoR jobs don't typically pay as well as other jobs and the problem space tends to be more boring (creating CRUDL api were fun the first 100x).
- datascienced 2y ago
  As a C#er who was interested in switching to rails: rails jobs pay less. And the kind of companies using it seem to be ones falling apart at the seams and interviewing was frustrating compared to C# jobs. I am not saying Rails is bad but more there is a common causation. Perhaps Rails being a go to for quick MVPs.
  - neonsunset 2y ago
    I'm curious, what led to the interest in the switch? Was it pre Core 3.1 or recent?
    - datascienced 2y ago
      It was 2013 ish IIRC so precore. Honestly probably just boredom at work. A new language will keep it interesting! And rails is a nice side project language.
      - neonsunset 2y ago
        Ah, okay, makes perfect sense. .NET stopped me from moving out at the very last moment by getting good around .NET Core 3.1 time :) (also by giving enough low level toys to stay interested)
  - badpun 2y ago
    C# is mostly adopted by large, hugely profitable companies which were penetrated by Microsoft sales teams, whereas Ruby companies are the opposite - startups which have made it past the startup stage. Some of them are successful, but majority are small and not that profitable.
- gonzo41 2y ago
  Hire someone young and train them.
  - zdragnar 2y ago
    We've got plans to do just that in a few months, but we need to get at least another one or two seniors on the team to have the right balance of capacity. Otherwise, we wouldn't really be doing the juniors any service by bringing them on.
- randomdata 2y ago
  > "what is polymorphism" I'm a senior developer at least in years, even writing my first Rails application when it was at version 0.6. I had to look this one up. And it seems the internet doesn't even share a consensus of what it means. Attempts to define it are all over the place. The non-tech definition seems to relate to tech most as to what people usually refer to as interfaces. In fact, one definition for "polymorphism" that I came across – which I dare say was the most reasonable of the bunch – asserted that interfaces are a formalization of polymorphism. I assume this matches your expectations. Given that, when would using the word "polymorphism" ever be useful as a senior developer? In Rails land, if you truly needed to communicate the concept to other developers (which is dubious), you're probably going to speak to duck typing instead. That is far more practical.
  - pixote 2y ago
    In the context of Rails, I assumed he was talking about polymorphic associations[0], which is quite common (e.g. active_storage_records) [0]https://guides.rubyonrails.org/association_basics.html#polymorphic-associations https://guides.rubyonrails.org/association_basics.html#polym...
dalemhurley 2y ago
Too often I hear hiring managers complain that they cannot find good candidates for XYZ specific language. This is the most annoying thing in programming. A good developer can get up to speed with a language in a few weeks. I have and I have had teams go from zero to building full platforms in a new stack. Programming is mainly breaking down problems, creating solutions and then implementing them. The coding is just the end result.
- datascienced 2y ago
  You want some experienced people with runtime platform knowledge in the team. For example async and thread semantics, common failure cases, best ways to do typing etc.
  - europeanNyan 2y ago
    If you are at the point where you are looking for additional Rails (or whatever) developers, you already hopefully have people with runtime platform knowledge in the team.
    - datascienced 2y ago
      Yes for sure. The danger is in building out new teams of people learning on the job.
ben7799 2y ago
The Ruby aspect here is interesting. My gut feeling in my area is if you are coming to these jobs with a non-traditional background and don't have a CS degree you are better off studying Ruby or Python or something a little less traditional. If you are applying to places that use more popular languages you're competing in a sea of candidates with degrees and experience in those languages. I feel like the Ruby and Python shops are going to be more open minded about hiring someone without the expected degrees, and they are probably a bit more loose about some stuff. I have almost exclusively worked at Java shops, but I did work one job that was a Python shop. The team borderline hated Java/C++/C# in a political way and was militant about how great Python was. If you shared their feelings they would have a strong affinity with a candidate. Where I work now we have long had one oddball product that is built on Ruby on Rails. It had an equally passionate/weirdly political team that was really adamant Ruby was better than anything else and they also hired more people from non-traditional backgrounds. After I left the Python position for quite a few years I got recruiters who were strictly trying to find developers who would do Python.. as if it was going to be more important than what the product was or the team composition or corporate culture. If someone calls/writes me about a job where the team works in Java, C#, etc.. they don't emphasize the language, they emphasize something about the company, who is funding it, what the product is, etc..

In my job search for remote USA roles it seems a little less popular than Django just bolstered by the GitHub and Shopify postings. Node, dotnet, go, and Java all seem more popular.

Lio 2y ago

Yes, it's popular enough that you can find work pretty easily. There's less openings than for JS, Java or C# but then there are less Ruby developers. That's the same as it ever was.

zdragnar 2y ago

Trying to hire for it has been deeply unpleasant. Very few people actually have the experience they claim to have, and asking them basic programming questions that any senior developer should be able to talk about has roughly 80% of the candidates going straight to chatgpt and pretending the answer is theirs. I'm not talking leetcode stuff either, more like "what is polymorphism" or "what is refactoring". Maybe the whole industry has gone that way... but the smaller talent pool makes it a lot more obvious. Were it up to me, we would be using something else where I work, and not just because of the smaller talent pool (although that's probably the biggest reason). Many of the "delightful" and time saving things about rails either turn out to have relatively insignificant impacts for complex applications, or turn into sharp edges that slow us down.

1123581321 2y ago
For experienced developers, it helps a lot to know the names of companies that use Rails. Every time you see an unfamiliar company, learn a bit about how they used Rails, through the interview, if nothing else is available. We're to the point where we can ask nearly anyone fairly specific questions about their contributions depending on the history we see on the resume. (I am not saying to avoid talking to people if you don't recognize the company.)
aantix 2y ago
If I had to guess from postings on Twitter and Linkedin, I think hiring is taking everyone by surprise. I remember a Linkedin comment talking about how the company received 1,000+ applicants for a single dev job. Some blame the layoffs. I don't think so. Before GPT, it was a struggle for devs to appear articulate in the domains that they reference on their resume. Possessing exceptional writing abilities was a definitive competitive advantage. It's no longer. Now everyone can sound like an expert and craft a pretty good, customized, concise cover letter. The whole process needs to move to video-based cover letters. It's as simple as that.
- krainboltgreene 2y ago
  > Now everyone can sound like an expert and craft a pretty good, customized, concise cover letter. Zero content coming from LLM's sounds like this and yes I've read quite a bit of output from a variety of them (including whatever version/release the reply is going to ask).
  - aantix 2y ago
    You probably have already read several cover letters from GPT that you didn't realize were programmatically generated.
    - krainboltgreene 2y ago
      I sincerely doubt that. Every one has been sharply obvious. I've also asked candidates after the fact and they were open about when they were/weren't. I haven't been wrong yet. There's this idea that LLM content is subversively good enough to pass muster, but ultimately if there's more than 3 sentences, it's not and you can ask any content moderator (Like publishing companies).
- datascienced 2y ago
  We are 1-2 years from chatgpt being able to fool interviewers. I mean speed, latency, audio generation and processing. Just connect your camera to the AI you and get your smart double to take the interview. “Are you a bot” is going to be a question and they are hoping the AI safety people will make it answer correctly.
itake 2y ago
Ex-ruby on rails dev here, the RoR jobs don't typically pay as well as other jobs and the problem space tends to be more boring (creating CRUDL api were fun the first 100x).
datascienced 2y ago
As a C#er who was interested in switching to rails: rails jobs pay less. And the kind of companies using it seem to be ones falling apart at the seams and interviewing was frustrating compared to C# jobs. I am not saying Rails is bad but more there is a common causation. Perhaps Rails being a go to for quick MVPs.
- neonsunset 2y ago
  I'm curious, what led to the interest in the switch? Was it pre Core 3.1 or recent?
  - datascienced 2y ago
    It was 2013 ish IIRC so precore. Honestly probably just boredom at work. A new language will keep it interesting! And rails is a nice side project language.
    - neonsunset 2y ago
      Ah, okay, makes perfect sense. .NET stopped me from moving out at the very last moment by getting good around .NET Core 3.1 time :) (also by giving enough low level toys to stay interested)
- badpun 2y ago
  C# is mostly adopted by large, hugely profitable companies which were penetrated by Microsoft sales teams, whereas Ruby companies are the opposite - startups which have made it past the startup stage. Some of them are successful, but majority are small and not that profitable.
gonzo41 2y ago
Hire someone young and train them.
- zdragnar 2y ago
  We've got plans to do just that in a few months, but we need to get at least another one or two seniors on the team to have the right balance of capacity. Otherwise, we wouldn't really be doing the juniors any service by bringing them on.
randomdata 2y ago
> "what is polymorphism" I'm a senior developer at least in years, even writing my first Rails application when it was at version 0.6. I had to look this one up. And it seems the internet doesn't even share a consensus of what it means. Attempts to define it are all over the place. The non-tech definition seems to relate to tech most as to what people usually refer to as interfaces. In fact, one definition for "polymorphism" that I came across – which I dare say was the most reasonable of the bunch – asserted that interfaces are a formalization of polymorphism. I assume this matches your expectations. Given that, when would using the word "polymorphism" ever be useful as a senior developer? In Rails land, if you truly needed to communicate the concept to other developers (which is dubious), you're probably going to speak to duck typing instead. That is far more practical.
- pixote 2y ago
  In the context of Rails, I assumed he was talking about polymorphic associations[0], which is quite common (e.g. active_storage_records) [0]https://guides.rubyonrails.org/association_basics.html#polymorphic-associations https://guides.rubyonrails.org/association_basics.html#polym...

dalemhurley 2y ago

Too often I hear hiring managers complain that they cannot find good candidates for XYZ specific language. This is the most annoying thing in programming. A good developer can get up to speed with a language in a few weeks. I have and I have had teams go from zero to building full platforms in a new stack. Programming is mainly breaking down problems, creating solutions and then implementing them. The coding is just the end result.

datascienced 2y ago
You want some experienced people with runtime platform knowledge in the team. For example async and thread semantics, common failure cases, best ways to do typing etc.
- europeanNyan 2y ago
  If you are at the point where you are looking for additional Rails (or whatever) developers, you already hopefully have people with runtime platform knowledge in the team.
  - datascienced 2y ago
    Yes for sure. The danger is in building out new teams of people learning on the job.

ben7799 2y ago

The Ruby aspect here is interesting. My gut feeling in my area is if you are coming to these jobs with a non-traditional background and don't have a CS degree you are better off studying Ruby or Python or something a little less traditional. If you are applying to places that use more popular languages you're competing in a sea of candidates with degrees and experience in those languages. I feel like the Ruby and Python shops are going to be more open minded about hiring someone without the expected degrees, and they are probably a bit more loose about some stuff. I have almost exclusively worked at Java shops, but I did work one job that was a Python shop. The team borderline hated Java/C++/C# in a political way and was militant about how great Python was. If you shared their feelings they would have a strong affinity with a candidate. Where I work now we have long had one oddball product that is built on Ruby on Rails. It had an equally passionate/weirdly political team that was really adamant Ruby was better than anything else and they also hired more people from non-traditional backgrounds. After I left the Python position for quite a few years I got recruiters who were strictly trying to find developers who would do Python.. as if it was going to be more important than what the product was or the team composition or corporate culture. If someone calls/writes me about a job where the team works in Java, C#, etc.. they don't emphasize the language, they emphasize something about the company, who is funding it, what the product is, etc..