The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real • Hacker News Board

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#11

Post by tdumitrescu » Sat, Feb 28, 2015, 3:47 PM UTC

ritchiea wrote: post #8

functionalfoo wrote: post #5

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 clie…

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 choos…

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.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#12

Post by bnastic » Sat, Feb 28, 2015, 3:50 PM UTC

BSousa wrote: post #4

cssmoo wrote: post #2

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.

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.

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.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#13

Post by toyg » Sat, Feb 28, 2015, 3:51 PM UTC

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.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#14

Post by leereeves » Sat, Feb 28, 2015, 3:57 PM UTC

ritchiea wrote: post #8

functionalfoo wrote: post #5

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 clie…

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 choos…

Most executives at non-webdev companies don't know anything about Rails, except what their staff and consultants tell them.

If a fair number of those executives learn too late about the technical limitations of Rails, they probably do feel burned, and word gets around.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#15

Post by marklit » Sat, Feb 28, 2015, 3:58 PM UTC

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?

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#16

Post by cssmoo » Sat, Feb 28, 2015, 3:58 PM UTC

bnastic wrote: post #12

BSousa wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

TBH that's a pretty small part of the market though. 99% of all LOB apps are CRUD stuff and integration.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#17

Post by cssmoo » Sat, Feb 28, 2015, 4:00 PM UTC

Iftheshoefits wrote: post #6

cssmoo wrote: post #2

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.

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 s…

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.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#18

Post by skc » Sat, Feb 28, 2015, 4:02 PM UTC

bnastic wrote: post #12

BSousa wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#19

Post by mattmanser » Sat, Feb 28, 2015, 4:05 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #13

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.

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.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#20

Post by pbowyer » Sat, Feb 28, 2015, 4:13 PM UTC

cssmoo wrote: post #17

Iftheshoefits wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

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.

Are those figures for London, or are you seeing them UK-wide?