The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real
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The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real
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Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real
#2It'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.
Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real
#3Obviously 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.
Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real
#4It'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.
Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real
#5The 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.
Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real
#6It'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 sleazy WP theme shop variety) and .NET jobs in the same category as a "cesspool". I can't disagree.
Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real
#7"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".
Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real
#8The 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 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?
Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real
#9My 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.
Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real
#10The 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…
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.