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The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

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Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#31

Post by JAlexoid »

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.

Please add a note to that £650 - financial experience required. I can pull £800 with Scala and Java.

Though I am not about to sell my soul for the £200 difference to spend that on psychotherapy afterwards.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#32

Post by ukigumo »

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 sure which part of the UK you are talking about, certainly not London and the City in particular.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#33

Post by makeitsuckless »

jalfresi wrote: post #24
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…

If that's the case, then there is still hope for Ruby enthusiasts. PHP has come out the other end, mostly by splitting into separate communities that only have the language in common.

The issue with Ruby is that it is so tightly associated with simple architecture of Rails. Nothing wrong with Rails in itself, but for many complex projects that require architectural solutions Rails doesn't support, Rails + inexperienced devs usually results in spaghetti code.

Ruby is fine, but RoR is toxic.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#34

Post by functionalfoo »

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…

Burnt in the sense that businesses hired people who claimed to have solid development experience, who claimed they could build robust maintainable systems, who claimed they could solve real business problems, who then turned out to be a lot less spectacular or solid than first thought, who believed the solution to every problem or design phase was to simply add more gems into the mix, who changed the whole state of the codebase because one luminary in the ruby world posted a blog article about how the hot thing on that day was to use pattern x instead of pattern y for designing your models vs controllers.

Most businesses are technology agnostic - they don't care what we use, if, if we deliver robust technically sound solutions. But when they trust developers, who fail to deliver, they mark the technology choice as well, to avoid getting similar problems in the future.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#35

Post by JAlexoid »

heidar wrote: post #21
mattmanser wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, there are not. There are a lot of ads with those rates, but most roles are ~ £450. Please note that a single contract goes out to many agencies that post the same contract, so you might think that there is a lot of £600+ roles. While in reality there is a lot of people posting the same role X^N times.

Some of those posts are not even real roles - new guys in agencies need to collect a lot of CVs, so they post bogus £600 contract and collect your CVs as "stuffing" for their "portfolio"

£700 are rates for an experienced core Java developer with investment banking or FX experience.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#36

Post by jarsin »

concerto wrote: post #10
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…

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.

This is my experience as well. I have seen horrible code bases on rails projects and horrible projects in java and .net etc.

Funny thing is a lot of the projects that were a mess because the devs could not manage the pressure the businesses put on them which made for some real bad decisions. The devs themselves were actually pretty good and knew the code base had gotten out of hand.

So now whenever someone says "oh this company wont use X because they got burned by those programmers" my internal alarms instantly start going off that the problem is more than likely the managers of the business.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#37

Post by JAlexoid »

marklit wrote: post #15

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…

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.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#38

Post by heidar »

JAlexoid wrote: post #35
heidar wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, there are not. There are a lot of ads with those rates, but most roles are ~ £450. Please note that a single contract goes out to many agencies that post the same contract, so you might think that there is a lot of £600+ roles. While in reality there is a lot of people posting the same role X^N times. Some of those posts are not even real roles - new guys in agencies need to collect a lot of CVs, so they post bog…

I'm sure that's also true but plenty are real. I know devs in London who are on those rates. And yeah, the Java roles are usually banks.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#39

Post by uptownJimmy »

cssmoo wrote: post #28
switch007 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

.Net is awesome. There's no need to apologize for working on a really powerful stack and making good money doing it. I've worked on Rails and Node projects, and they don't compare favorably to the power and robustness and usability of .Net. And I'd choose .Net over Java every time, even for a little less pay. .Net is hitting a really sweet spot these days.

Re: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

#40

Post by louishk »

JAlexoid wrote: post #31
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.

Please add a note to that £650 - financial experience required. I can pull £800 with Scala and Java. Though I am not about to sell my soul for the £200 difference to spend that on psychotherapy afterwards.

How much / what sort of financial experience is required?
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