6 ms·

The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

48 points by necrodawg 12y ago

cssmoo 12y ago
It's all about .Net in the UK. Go learn it. I can walk out of a contract on a Friday and start another on a Monday and it's been like this forever and the market demand is increasing and the staff supply declining. Can't lose.
- BSousa 12y ago
  Not in the uk but interested in the job market there and I agree as I consider it my 'backup' in case things go south for me. The number of .net jobs vs anything else is just ridiculous. If you want to work in London and be secure in your job or job search, .net is where you want to be.
  - bnastic 12y ago
    This depends on the industry, e.g. anyone doing anything remotely performance oriented is not touching Windows unless they have a legacy stack to maintain.
    - cssmoo 12y ago
      TBH that's a pretty small part of the market though. 99% of all LOB apps are CRUD stuff and integration.
    - skc 12y ago
      When you say "performance oriented" what do you mean anyway? But even humoring you here, I would argue that the very, very vast majority of contracts out there are not "performance oriented" and so the point may be moot.
- Iftheshoefits 12y ago
  What about pay, though? Here in the US, at least from my perspective, .NET contracting is slightly better than PHP contracting. That is, most of the .NET jobs are (relatively) poor paying with the kind of cheap, demanding client we've all had horror story experiences with. Exceptions would be in finance, where you get to be treated like shit because you aren't a tradeer. One of my colleagues lumped "webdev" (of the sleazy WP theme shop variety) and .NET jobs in the same category as a "cesspool". I can't disagree.
  - cssmoo 12y ago
    Pay is good. If you're good at it, it's pretty amazing. You can pull £650/day on contract if you know your shit. If you don't but can drive Visual Studio, £400/day is easy.
    - pbowyer 12y ago
      Are those figures for London, or are you seeing them UK-wide?
      - cssmoo 12y ago
        Take 20-30% off for outside M25 i.e. in line with cost of living reduction.
        petercooper 12y ago
        And another 20% off if any further north than Oxford or Cambridge.
    - JAlexoid 12y ago
      Please add a note to that £650 - financial experience required. I can pull £800 with Scala and Java. Though I am not about to sell my soul for the £200 difference to spend that on psychotherapy afterwards.
      - louishk 12y ago
- switch007 12y ago
  I won't sell my soul, no matter how much it pays ;)
  - cssmoo 12y ago
    We're all brain prostitutes so our soul is already sold. What remains is merely comfort, which .Net provides.
    - uptownJimmy 12y ago
      .Net is awesome. There's no need to apologize for working on a really powerful stack and making good money doing it. I've worked on Rails and Node projects, and they don't compare favorably to the power and robustness and usability of .Net. And I'd choose .Net over Java every time, even for a little less pay. .Net is hitting a really sweet spot these days.
- ukigumo 12y ago
  Not sure which part of the UK you are talking about, certainly not London and the City in particular.
concerto 12y ago
Obviously the author has more of a historical overview, but, anecdotally, I am getting the same quantity of contact concerning roles as I have ever done, but there seem to be more and more recruitment companies moving into the ruby space. I would say it is also possible that what the author is seeing is less of a slowdown in the ruby market and more of increased competition in the recruitment market. Having dealt with the author previously (though never having taken a role through him) I hope his approach of specialising in a technology stack and pursuing that as a specialist, gaining knowledge of both the hirers and potential contractors, wins out over the LinkedIn profile fishers.
functionalfoo 12y ago
The truth is not nice, but here it goes: A lot of companies got burnt on ruby related projects. Especially anything rails related. There is a steady pipeline of work right now for skilled developers to migrate services and code from ruby to go, Scala, java - basically anything else except ruby. I have earnt quite well doing such gigs, although I tend do more erlang/elixir stuff these days. I would always ask the clients what happened, and why they want to migrate rather than maintain or even build out their ruby code bases, and the answer was always the same - the developers in the ruby space were mostly sub-par. Often several degrees below java developers in terms of skill and ability. I would say it tallies with my experiences too. It is also for this reason they are not using node js - because it was seen as the next shiny, all the half-devs from ruby jumped onto it, and the risk of crap codebases from the same amateurs is ever present.
- ritchiea 12y ago
  Ok let's be serious what does burned mean? My impression is that most people use Rails because it allows you to be very productive very quickly. Presumably that means you know you're trading performance for productivity. Maybe you'll have to do a re-write of parts of your app in another language for performance reasons or because you need to perform some operations concurrently, but you know up front you're not choosing the language strictly because of its technical performance but instead because of business constraints. Keeping that in mind, were those companies really burned by Rails or were they making lazy decisions and not being honest about what their plan was for their software?
  - tdumitrescu 12y ago
    I don't think it's about performance. It's about the glut of inexperienced, underskilled Ruby devs landing seemingly simple gigs where they patch together unmaintainable Rails spaghetti - ultimately saddling clients/employers with a heap of technical debt and hobbling future devs who come to these projects.
    - sanderjd 12y ago
      This is a case of getting what you're willing to pay for. Great work is expensive because it takes a lot of experience to do, and there are a lot of opportunities for those with a lot of experience. But if you're willing to sacrifice the "great work" part, there are plenty of people out there with less experience doing (potentially) less great work for less cost. Everybody would like above market work for below market cost, but it doesn't tend to work that way.
pja 12y ago
"Scrum Masters...The main issues in the Scrum Master market are that lots of Project Managers and people from somewhat similar disciplines doing the two day certification and are repackaging their careers on their CVs and jumping on the current Scrum Master bandwagon." Well that pretty much confirms my perception of "Scrum Masters".
mbesto 12y ago
My anecdotal impression (I lived in the UK for 3 years) is that not enough companies that adopted Ruby in it's hayday (i.e. 2006-2012) have survived today. Which means, it never caught on with the "enterprise" in the UK, and most of the companies that have survived are still using .NET/Java/PHP. Generally speaking (again, my anecdotal experience), the UK as a whole are tech laggards compared to the US. They'll wait until it gets developed and fixed here, and then adopt it when it's ready. However, as soon as it is ready, they do tend to adopt very quickly (and become quite good). It's no coincidence that Node.js and the startup scene are now synonymously popular right now in the UK and Ruby isn't.
- JAlexoid 12y ago
  In my experience Ruby has become a niche thing. It never moved on to the enterprise at scales that all the hype-men wanted it to almost 10 years ago. And the startups have found other tools.
toyg 12y ago
I suspect part of the problem is the "flood of contractors", due to low salaries for permanent jobs. A "senior java developer" job in the North is advertised as 45k, which is ridiculously low; if I were in that position, I'd be very tempted to just quit and go contracting, where you can make 20k in a single month. But of course, if everyone does that, the contractors market gets saturated.
- mattmanser 12y ago
  How is that ridiculously low? The UK has always lagged well behind America in dev pay and has only been accelerating in pay for the last 5 years. 5 years ago a senior dev position outside London was around 35k. Now it's up to 45k and I'm starting to get emails with 50ks mentioned. To make '20k' you would have to earn £900 per day, when the going rate outside London is £300 p/d, and even as recently as a year ago it was £250 p/d. You earn £900 p/d consulting, not developing. I've always blamed the 'BBC micro' effect for our lower pay, we had a lot more exposure to computers as kids in the 80s and so reached 'peak developer' a lot later than the Americans did. Also in the UK the idea that the peons could be worth more than the managers was anathema until the last decade, a class divide throwback.
  - heidar 12y ago
    There are lots of contracts in London with 500-700 GBP per day rates...Java/Ruby/Node and more. Those are for dev roles, not consulting roles.
    - JAlexoid 12y ago
      No, there are not. There are a lot of ads with those rates, but most roles are ~ £450. Please note that a single contract goes out to many agencies that post the same contract, so you might think that there is a lot of £600+ roles. While in reality there is a lot of people posting the same role X^N times. Some of those posts are not even real roles - new guys in agencies need to collect a lot of CVs, so they post bogus £600 contract and collect your CVs as "stuffing" for their "portfolio" £700 are rates for an experienced core Java developer with investment banking or FX experience.
marklit 12y ago
I'm a UK-based contractor (albeit mostly working with Python) and without fail I have at least 10 new recruiters add me on LinkedIn every week. What are the chances this author is in a flooded recruiter market? Edit: The last time I sat in an office in Shoreditch there were contractors there doing frontend, project management, design and product ownership. There was a conversation one day where the eluded to 'backend contractors always being in work' and it being a bit of struggle for the others to always find work. Have the Rails devs here felt they were always in work in the past?
- JAlexoid 12y ago
  LinkedIn is a tool to connect to random people without a reason. I get the same thing and yet I got all of my contracts through people I know, not some random time-wasters from eSynergySolutions, PeopleSource and other crap.
- stevenwilkin 12y ago
  I've had the same experience with a constant stream of freshly minted recruiters want to add me on LinkedIn each and every week. I've done contract Rails dev in London for the past 2 years now, before that I had clients in the South of England, Dublin and Belfast. Apart from holidays I've not spent any considerable time out of work.
makeitsuckless 12y ago
No idea if this applies to the UK, but in the Netherlands the word is that bigger companies have been switching from outsourcing to agencies and contractors to creating/expanding their own in-house teams. With online services now fully established at senior management level as part of the core business (software eating the world etc) and no longer seen as "projects", this is natural development. And it's not just contractors that feel the consequences, it's also the specialized agencies that can no longer get those big fat contracts building web apps for established companies.
paulbjensen 12y ago
Can't comment on Ruby, but in relation to Node.js in London it's very much a seller's market at the moment; good developers with commercial experience are contracting at £550pd, and very few are interested in taking permanent roles. It's a good time to be a software developer in London, and not so good if you're trying to recruit one.
LouisRoR 12y ago
Hey, I wrote the article, really appreciate the discussion. Just want to reiterate that until this point, the market has been healthy and I'm expecting it to recover. The tone of the discussion here is a bit doom and gloom. I still think its got at least 2 more healthy years before it becomes how PHP is now.
- livaliva 12y ago
  Louis or anyone else can you share your thoughts about PHP contract market in London please? I'm perm PHP developer thinking to start contracting. Is that market so bad?
dd4315 12y ago
As a prospective new developer, is ruby/rails still a good bet or are the skills not going to be required in a year or so? Less worried about contracting rates for the moment, keen to work in startups which is where I understand rails is being used constantly.
Olivier_dS 12y ago
My thought of the day is that Ruby is good to know for Chef and Puppet, the market seems high for these. Ruby On Rails is brilliant for startups and prototyping. I hear devs talking down about Ruby On Rails, taking into example LinkedIn that has moved away from Rails to Scala and NodeJs. The thing is, when you scale like LinkedIn, servers become more expensive than developers. In that sort of situation, it becomes a lot more interesting to move to Scala. Scala and Ruby are both in a sweet spot, but both in a different market. Of course there will always be the fashion of the latest skewing the market, and that can make it hard to see the effect these could have on the long term. I also hear devs talking down about the Java market. As if Java was going to disappear anytime soon. I don't think so. All languages suffer from programmers that have no interest to improve their skills and have a "can do" attitude. No matter which language we are talking about, they are all bound to be spaghetti code at the end of the day. That's why there are conventions and software architects. It is like building a house, getting painters, plasterers, masons and electricians to build a house, just that there aren't any plans. I am learning now Ruby, but I don't think I would stay there for big applications. My problem is not the language, but the lack of tools, or to be more precise, the quality of those tools. C# got Visual Studio, PHP works great with Netbeans, Java got Eclipse and Netbeans. Ruby might be good on Visual Studio, but I got a Mac.

48 points by necrodawg 12y ago

It's all about .Net in the UK. Go learn it. I can walk out of a contract on a Friday and start another on a Monday and it's been like this forever and the market demand is increasing and the staff supply declining. Can't lose.

BSousa 12y ago
Not in the uk but interested in the job market there and I agree as I consider it my 'backup' in case things go south for me. The number of .net jobs vs anything else is just ridiculous. If you want to work in London and be secure in your job or job search, .net is where you want to be.
- bnastic 12y ago
  This depends on the industry, e.g. anyone doing anything remotely performance oriented is not touching Windows unless they have a legacy stack to maintain.
  - cssmoo 12y ago
    TBH that's a pretty small part of the market though. 99% of all LOB apps are CRUD stuff and integration.
  - skc 12y ago
    When you say "performance oriented" what do you mean anyway? But even humoring you here, I would argue that the very, very vast majority of contracts out there are not "performance oriented" and so the point may be moot.
Iftheshoefits 12y ago
What about pay, though? Here in the US, at least from my perspective, .NET contracting is slightly better than PHP contracting. That is, most of the .NET jobs are (relatively) poor paying with the kind of cheap, demanding client we've all had horror story experiences with. Exceptions would be in finance, where you get to be treated like shit because you aren't a tradeer. One of my colleagues lumped "webdev" (of the sleazy WP theme shop variety) and .NET jobs in the same category as a "cesspool". I can't disagree.
- cssmoo 12y ago
  Pay is good. If you're good at it, it's pretty amazing. You can pull £650/day on contract if you know your shit. If you don't but can drive Visual Studio, £400/day is easy.
  - pbowyer 12y ago
    Are those figures for London, or are you seeing them UK-wide?
    - cssmoo 12y ago
      Take 20-30% off for outside M25 i.e. in line with cost of living reduction.
      - petercooper 12y ago
        And another 20% off if any further north than Oxford or Cambridge.
  - JAlexoid 12y ago
    Please add a note to that £650 - financial experience required. I can pull £800 with Scala and Java. Though I am not about to sell my soul for the £200 difference to spend that on psychotherapy afterwards.
    - louishk 12y ago
switch007 12y ago
I won't sell my soul, no matter how much it pays ;)
- cssmoo 12y ago
  We're all brain prostitutes so our soul is already sold. What remains is merely comfort, which .Net provides.
  - uptownJimmy 12y ago
    .Net is awesome. There's no need to apologize for working on a really powerful stack and making good money doing it. I've worked on Rails and Node projects, and they don't compare favorably to the power and robustness and usability of .Net. And I'd choose .Net over Java every time, even for a little less pay. .Net is hitting a really sweet spot these days.
ukigumo 12y ago
Not sure which part of the UK you are talking about, certainly not London and the City in particular.

concerto 12y ago

Obviously the author has more of a historical overview, but, anecdotally, I am getting the same quantity of contact concerning roles as I have ever done, but there seem to be more and more recruitment companies moving into the ruby space. I would say it is also possible that what the author is seeing is less of a slowdown in the ruby market and more of increased competition in the recruitment market. Having dealt with the author previously (though never having taken a role through him) I hope his approach of specialising in a technology stack and pursuing that as a specialist, gaining knowledge of both the hirers and potential contractors, wins out over the LinkedIn profile fishers.

functionalfoo 12y ago

The truth is not nice, but here it goes: A lot of companies got burnt on ruby related projects. Especially anything rails related. There is a steady pipeline of work right now for skilled developers to migrate services and code from ruby to go, Scala, java - basically anything else except ruby. I have earnt quite well doing such gigs, although I tend do more erlang/elixir stuff these days. I would always ask the clients what happened, and why they want to migrate rather than maintain or even build out their ruby code bases, and the answer was always the same - the developers in the ruby space were mostly sub-par. Often several degrees below java developers in terms of skill and ability. I would say it tallies with my experiences too. It is also for this reason they are not using node js - because it was seen as the next shiny, all the half-devs from ruby jumped onto it, and the risk of crap codebases from the same amateurs is ever present.

ritchiea 12y ago
Ok let's be serious what does burned mean? My impression is that most people use Rails because it allows you to be very productive very quickly. Presumably that means you know you're trading performance for productivity. Maybe you'll have to do a re-write of parts of your app in another language for performance reasons or because you need to perform some operations concurrently, but you know up front you're not choosing the language strictly because of its technical performance but instead because of business constraints. Keeping that in mind, were those companies really burned by Rails or were they making lazy decisions and not being honest about what their plan was for their software?
- tdumitrescu 12y ago
  I don't think it's about performance. It's about the glut of inexperienced, underskilled Ruby devs landing seemingly simple gigs where they patch together unmaintainable Rails spaghetti - ultimately saddling clients/employers with a heap of technical debt and hobbling future devs who come to these projects.
  - sanderjd 12y ago
    This is a case of getting what you're willing to pay for. Great work is expensive because it takes a lot of experience to do, and there are a lot of opportunities for those with a lot of experience. But if you're willing to sacrifice the "great work" part, there are plenty of people out there with less experience doing (potentially) less great work for less cost. Everybody would like above market work for below market cost, but it doesn't tend to work that way.

pja 12y ago

"Scrum Masters...The main issues in the Scrum Master market are that lots of Project Managers and people from somewhat similar disciplines doing the two day certification and are repackaging their careers on their CVs and jumping on the current Scrum Master bandwagon." Well that pretty much confirms my perception of "Scrum Masters".

mbesto 12y ago

My anecdotal impression (I lived in the UK for 3 years) is that not enough companies that adopted Ruby in it's hayday (i.e. 2006-2012) have survived today. Which means, it never caught on with the "enterprise" in the UK, and most of the companies that have survived are still using .NET/Java/PHP. Generally speaking (again, my anecdotal experience), the UK as a whole are tech laggards compared to the US. They'll wait until it gets developed and fixed here, and then adopt it when it's ready. However, as soon as it is ready, they do tend to adopt very quickly (and become quite good). It's no coincidence that Node.js and the startup scene are now synonymously popular right now in the UK and Ruby isn't.

JAlexoid 12y ago
In my experience Ruby has become a niche thing. It never moved on to the enterprise at scales that all the hype-men wanted it to almost 10 years ago. And the startups have found other tools.

toyg 12y ago

I suspect part of the problem is the "flood of contractors", due to low salaries for permanent jobs. A "senior java developer" job in the North is advertised as 45k, which is ridiculously low; if I were in that position, I'd be very tempted to just quit and go contracting, where you can make 20k in a single month. But of course, if everyone does that, the contractors market gets saturated.

mattmanser 12y ago
How is that ridiculously low? The UK has always lagged well behind America in dev pay and has only been accelerating in pay for the last 5 years. 5 years ago a senior dev position outside London was around 35k. Now it's up to 45k and I'm starting to get emails with 50ks mentioned. To make '20k' you would have to earn £900 per day, when the going rate outside London is £300 p/d, and even as recently as a year ago it was £250 p/d. You earn £900 p/d consulting, not developing. I've always blamed the 'BBC micro' effect for our lower pay, we had a lot more exposure to computers as kids in the 80s and so reached 'peak developer' a lot later than the Americans did. Also in the UK the idea that the peons could be worth more than the managers was anathema until the last decade, a class divide throwback.
- heidar 12y ago
  There are lots of contracts in London with 500-700 GBP per day rates...Java/Ruby/Node and more. Those are for dev roles, not consulting roles.
  - JAlexoid 12y ago
    No, there are not. There are a lot of ads with those rates, but most roles are ~ £450. Please note that a single contract goes out to many agencies that post the same contract, so you might think that there is a lot of £600+ roles. While in reality there is a lot of people posting the same role X^N times. Some of those posts are not even real roles - new guys in agencies need to collect a lot of CVs, so they post bogus £600 contract and collect your CVs as "stuffing" for their "portfolio" £700 are rates for an experienced core Java developer with investment banking or FX experience.

marklit 12y ago

I'm a UK-based contractor (albeit mostly working with Python) and without fail I have at least 10 new recruiters add me on LinkedIn every week. What are the chances this author is in a flooded recruiter market? Edit: The last time I sat in an office in Shoreditch there were contractors there doing frontend, project management, design and product ownership. There was a conversation one day where the eluded to 'backend contractors always being in work' and it being a bit of struggle for the others to always find work. Have the Rails devs here felt they were always in work in the past?

JAlexoid 12y ago
LinkedIn is a tool to connect to random people without a reason. I get the same thing and yet I got all of my contracts through people I know, not some random time-wasters from eSynergySolutions, PeopleSource and other crap.
stevenwilkin 12y ago
I've had the same experience with a constant stream of freshly minted recruiters want to add me on LinkedIn each and every week. I've done contract Rails dev in London for the past 2 years now, before that I had clients in the South of England, Dublin and Belfast. Apart from holidays I've not spent any considerable time out of work.

makeitsuckless 12y ago

No idea if this applies to the UK, but in the Netherlands the word is that bigger companies have been switching from outsourcing to agencies and contractors to creating/expanding their own in-house teams. With online services now fully established at senior management level as part of the core business (software eating the world etc) and no longer seen as "projects", this is natural development. And it's not just contractors that feel the consequences, it's also the specialized agencies that can no longer get those big fat contracts building web apps for established companies.

paulbjensen 12y ago

Can't comment on Ruby, but in relation to Node.js in London it's very much a seller's market at the moment; good developers with commercial experience are contracting at £550pd, and very few are interested in taking permanent roles. It's a good time to be a software developer in London, and not so good if you're trying to recruit one.

LouisRoR 12y ago

Hey, I wrote the article, really appreciate the discussion. Just want to reiterate that until this point, the market has been healthy and I'm expecting it to recover. The tone of the discussion here is a bit doom and gloom. I still think its got at least 2 more healthy years before it becomes how PHP is now.

livaliva 12y ago
Louis or anyone else can you share your thoughts about PHP contract market in London please? I'm perm PHP developer thinking to start contracting. Is that market so bad?

dd4315 12y ago

As a prospective new developer, is ruby/rails still a good bet or are the skills not going to be required in a year or so? Less worried about contracting rates for the moment, keen to work in startups which is where I understand rails is being used constantly.

Olivier_dS 12y ago

My thought of the day is that Ruby is good to know for Chef and Puppet, the market seems high for these. Ruby On Rails is brilliant for startups and prototyping. I hear devs talking down about Ruby On Rails, taking into example LinkedIn that has moved away from Rails to Scala and NodeJs. The thing is, when you scale like LinkedIn, servers become more expensive than developers. In that sort of situation, it becomes a lot more interesting to move to Scala. Scala and Ruby are both in a sweet spot, but both in a different market. Of course there will always be the fashion of the latest skewing the market, and that can make it hard to see the effect these could have on the long term. I also hear devs talking down about the Java market. As if Java was going to disappear anytime soon. I don't think so. All languages suffer from programmers that have no interest to improve their skills and have a "can do" attitude. No matter which language we are talking about, they are all bound to be spaghetti code at the end of the day. That's why there are conventions and software architects. It is like building a house, getting painters, plasterers, masons and electricians to build a house, just that there aren't any plans. I am learning now Ruby, but I don't think I would stay there for big applications. My problem is not the language, but the lack of tools, or to be more precise, the quality of those tools. C# got Visual Studio, PHP works great with Netbeans, Java got Eclipse and Netbeans. Ruby might be good on Visual Studio, but I got a Mac.