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.
This has been my perception too; over the past couple of years we've been inundated with recruitment agencies trying to pass on these Ruby/Rails devs like its the new hot shit and all I've ever seen in my experience is spagetti codebases and sloppy work. Node is the same. It used to be PHP devs were this class (we refer to them as "enthusiastic ametuers" but the "brogrammer" name also equally applies; people who are just starting a career in development who dont know they dont know anything, or simply dont care in the case of brogrammers).
It's my understanding that the mood is simply that rails/ruby/node is toxic; its the same with what used to be SEO, they've all become UX snake oil salesmen.
As a Go dev, I'm crapping it that Go may be the next bandwagon jumped onto :( It kinda makes me glad when I see all those comments complaining about lack of generics!
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?
Conversely, I have had a lot of work from companies switching from Java to Ruby due to the high costs and relative slow speeds of such developments. As someone who started out mainly working in Java, but now works mainly in ruby/rails I think the whole "rails == amateurs" argument you are making is oversimplistic. All languages are tools and there are always situations where one is more appropriate than another.
That might be true in London, but in Toronto essentially every major success story is Rails, Python, JS, and Go. Roughly in that order. The few Java code bases I've seen were horrendous.
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.
"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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
£20k of income(sans VAT) per month is barely possible. If you're at the level of being paid £45k - you will not earn £20k per month during first year. £20k per month is ~ £900 per day @ 22 days per month, and that is paid to very well known consultants.
But what I will agree with is that the disparity of contractor pay and permanent pay in UK is staggering.
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.
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?
[+] [-] functionalfoo|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jalfresi|11 years ago|reply
It's my understanding that the mood is simply that rails/ruby/node is toxic; its the same with what used to be SEO, they've all become UX snake oil salesmen.
As a Go dev, I'm crapping it that Go may be the next bandwagon jumped onto :( It kinda makes me glad when I see all those comments complaining about lack of generics!
[+] [-] ritchiea|11 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] concerto|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3pt14159|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] concerto|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pja|11 years ago|reply
Well that pretty much confirms my perception of "Scrum Masters".
[+] [-] mbesto|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makeitsuckless|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
It's a good time to be a software developer in London, and not so good if you're trying to recruit one.
[+] [-] marklit|11 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] stevenwilkin|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] JAlexoid|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Olivier_dS|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cssmoo|11 years ago|reply
Can't lose.
[+] [-] ukigumo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Iftheshoefits|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] switch007|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BSousa|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dd4315|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toyg|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattmanser|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] JAlexoid|11 years ago|reply
But what I will agree with is that the disparity of contractor pay and permanent pay in UK is staggering.
[+] [-] LouisRoR|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply