The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real

The truth is not nice, but here it goes:<p>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.<p>I have earnt quite well doing such gigs, although I tend do more erlang&#x2F;elixir stuff these days.<p>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.<p>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.

Obviously 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.<p>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.

&quot;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.&quot;<p>Well that pretty much confirms my perception of &quot;Scrum Masters&quot;.

My anecdotal impression (I lived in the UK for 3 years) is that not enough companies that adopted Ruby in it&#x27;s hayday (i.e. 2006-2012) have survived today. Which means, it never caught on with the &quot;enterprise&quot; in the UK, and most of the companies that <i>have</i> survived are still using .NET&#x2F;Java&#x2F;PHP.<p>Generally speaking (again, my anecdotal experience), the UK as a whole are tech laggards compared to the US. They&#x27;ll wait until it gets developed and fixed here, and then adopt it when it&#x27;s ready. However, as soon as it is ready, they do tend to adopt very quickly (and become quite good). It&#x27;s no coincidence that Node.js and the startup scene are now synonymously popular right now in the UK and Ruby isn&#x27;t.

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&#x2F;expanding their own in-house teams.<p>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 &quot;projects&quot;, this is natural development.<p>And it&#x27;s not just contractors that feel the consequences, it&#x27;s also the specialized agencies that can no longer get those big fat contracts building web apps for established companies.

Can&#x27;t comment on Ruby, but in relation to Node.js in London it&#x27;s very much a seller&#x27;s market at the moment; good developers with commercial experience are contracting at £550pd, and very few are interested in taking permanent roles.<p>It&#x27;s a good time to be a software developer in London, and not so good if you&#x27;re trying to recruit one.

I&#x27;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?<p>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 &#x27;backend contractors always being in work&#x27; 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?

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&#x27;t think so. All languages suffer from programmers that have no interest to improve their skills and have a &quot;can do&quot; attitude. No matter which language we are talking about, they are all bound to be spaghetti code at the end of the day. That&#x27;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&#x27;t any plans. I am learning now Ruby, but I don&#x27;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.

It&#x27;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&#x27;s been like this forever and the market demand is increasing and the staff supply declining.<p>Can&#x27;t lose.

As a prospective new developer, is ruby&#x2F;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.

I suspect part of the problem is the &quot;flood of contractors&quot;, due to low salaries for permanent jobs. A &quot;senior java developer&quot; job in the North is advertised as 45k, which is ridiculously low; if I were in that position, I&#x27;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.

Hey, I wrote the article, really appreciate the discussion.<p>Just want to reiterate that until this point, the market has been healthy and I&#x27;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.