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The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

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Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#51

Post by jsolson »

JAlexoid wrote: post #26
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.

Out of curiosity, how bad are taxes? How much of that 20k could a developer actually expect to take home?

To give an example, I live in Seattle in the US (which is relevant as many states in the US apply additional taxes on top of those applied federally). My effective tax rate is probably somewhere around 35-40% of my gross income. I'm curious if devs in the UK are looking at a similar deal, or if more than half of that 20k per month is going to evaporate into taxes... also how does that vary for contract versus permanent work (in the US it would cause an immediate 7.5% bump in my tax rate, I believe).

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#52

Post by sanderjd »

tdumitrescu wrote: post #11
ritchiea wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#53

Post by jalfresi »

ritchiea wrote: post #50
busterarm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So for someone who is working with ruby but technology agnostic and trying to land a gig as a junior dev, what do you suggest? I feel like switching stacks before actually getting work might do more harm than good and at this stage I'm not looking to contract.

Don't switch stacks. He's expressing an opinion about code from Rails developers which is about as broad as opinions go this side of saying "black people are like X" or "Asians are like Y." On the bright side he does leave the door open that Rails developers could write solid code though most don't in his opinion. The best thing you could do is continue working on Rails but read a variety of opinions on good code in…

This is probably the soundest advice and agree wholeheartedly; the market appears to be saturated with inexperienced developers. This means, at somepoint (probably about now actually) there will be a very real need for good/great rails/ruby devs to come in and sort out all this mess. Not everyone will be able to dump and rewrite their projects; some will need tidying and new features added. You could make a killing there is your disciplined (think of Y2K and all the old experienced cobol devs coming out the framework to fix stuff)

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#54

Post by jalfresi »

sanderjd wrote: post #52
tdumitrescu wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 marke…

I see what you're getting at but when Ruby/Rails was all new and shiny a couple of years back I knew an awful lot os junior/inexperienced devs who quite permanent jobs to go freelance/consulting for ruby/rails jobs because the money being paid was way above that for other similar level devs. It was pure hype, and to be fair to everyone who did this, the saw the writing on the wall and rode the wave. I even knew one SEO Exec who switched to ruby/rails contract dev work; if that isn't a warning sign, I don't know what is!

Just to note, I'm a PHP dev who works in SEO, and have done for years, during the great SEO boom, so I know bad code and I know snake oil salesmen. But I think in about 12/18 months time, once all the charlatans have moved on, the ruby/rails devs left will be experienced, battle hardend legacy devs, and the respect will begin., much like the SEO industry now.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#55

Post by toyg »

jsolson wrote: post #51
JAlexoid wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

£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.

Out of curiosity, how bad are taxes? How much of that 20k could a developer actually expect to take home? To give an example, I live in Seattle in the US (which is relevant as many states in the US apply additional taxes on top of those applied federally). My effective tax rate is probably somewhere around 35-40% of my gross income. I'm curious if devs in the UK are looking at a similar deal, or if more than half of…

UK is not Scandinavia or France. Effective taxation on personal income is on similar levels as US.

Contractors have a different set of rules from regular employees but they end up paying more or less the same tax (often less, if they have a smart setup -- corporation tax is lower than income tax); there are other disparities (it's harder to get loans/mortgages etc) but not tax afaik.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#56

Post by toyg »

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…

> How is that ridiculously low?

Compared with consulting rates and salaries in specialized niches (SAP etc), 45k for experienced and competent developers is way too low.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#57

Post by LouisRoR »

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.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#58

Post by dd4315 »

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.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#59

Post by livaliva »

LouisRoR wrote: post #57

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?

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#60

Post by Olivier_dS »

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.
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