The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real • Hacker News Board

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#21

Post by heidar » Sat, Feb 28, 2015, 4:16 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #19

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 w…

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.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#22

Post by switch007 » Sat, Feb 28, 2015, 4:17 PM UTC

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.

I won't sell my soul, no matter how much it pays ;)

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#23

Post by cssmoo » Sat, Feb 28, 2015, 4:20 PM UTC

pbowyer wrote: post #20

cssmoo wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Take 20-30% off for outside M25 i.e. in line with cost of living reduction.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#24

Post by jalfresi » Sat, Feb 28, 2015, 4:21 PM UTC

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…

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!

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#25

Post by 3pt14159 » Sat, Feb 28, 2015, 4:22 PM UTC

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…

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.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#26

Post by JAlexoid » Sat, Feb 28, 2015, 4:23 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.

£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.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#27

Post by JAlexoid » Sat, Feb 28, 2015, 4:25 PM UTC

3pt14159 wrote: post #25

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…

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.

Anecdotal evidence on both sides is anecdotal.

Ruby is past it's hype and others are taking up the space. Node.js is very good at replacing Ruby for quick development and Typesafe's Play works better for Java shops.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#28

Post by cssmoo » Sat, Feb 28, 2015, 4:27 PM UTC

switch007 wrote: post #22

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.

I won't sell my soul, no matter how much it pays ;)

We're all brain prostitutes so our soul is already sold. What remains is merely comfort, which .Net provides.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#29

Post by makeitsuckless » Sat, Feb 28, 2015, 4:29 PM UTC

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.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#30

Post by JAlexoid » Sat, Feb 28, 2015, 4:32 PM UTC

mbesto wrote: post #9

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 u…

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.