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Posted
17 February 2009 @ 12pm

Tagged
programming, rubyonrails

Rails Dev Shortages

Mr. Frenandez’s post on Rails Maturity has sparked quite a reaction, most notably from Mr. Bowkett. There was one part that made me happy and frustrated all in one go:

Actually, I hate to end on a bad note, but I really think that there’s some urgency to all this and that our collective failure to set high standards for the community is strangling the continued growth of Ruby and Rails overall.

Tom Mornini: Our customers at Engine Yard are screaming for more developer capacity, and in fact, TWO previous customers abandoned Rails (one for PHP and the other for Java) simply because they could not find enough skilled and savvy Rails developers to move their projects forward.

It’s not a problem only for Tom and Engine Yard. At Hashrocket we’ve been helping organizations transition from legacy technologies to Rails and they all have difficulties finding qualified developers. I know that folks like Courtenay at ENTP are having the same problem. Please don’t shoot the messenger. Something has to be done about this, and I think it’s more important than Rails 3 or anything else we are currently excited about.

If this is you, if you’re looking for someone who would make a great rails dev, please post in the comments.

[update] I would also love to work with erlang, if anyone is listening.

2 Comments

Posted by
shennyg
22 March 2009 @ 8pm

So true

I was talking with a friend today who is currently leaning toward PHP to build his next startup based on availability and price of developers (php vs rails).


Posted by
John Bender
22 March 2009 @ 9pm

@shennyg

The reality is that if you get a good rails developer they cost is negligible compared to the productivity and quality. It’s been my experience that rails devs care more often about the final product. Just my opinion, no survey’s or stats to back it up.


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