
The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real - necrodawg
https://medium.com/@louisror/the-uk-ruby-contract-drought-is-real-27-feb-2015-fbac443b81da
======
functionalfoo
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 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.

~~~
ritchiea
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?

~~~
tdumitrescu
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.

~~~
sanderjd
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.

~~~
jalfresi
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.

------
concerto
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.

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.

------
pja
"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".

------
mbesto
My 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.

~~~
JAlexoid
In my experience Ruby has become a niche thing. It never moved on to the
enterprise at scales that all the hype-men wanted it to almost 10 years ago.
And the startups have found other tools.

------
makeitsuckless
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/expanding their own in-house teams.

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
"projects", this is natural development.

And it's not just contractors that feel the consequences, it's also the
specialized agencies that can no longer get those big fat contracts building
web apps for established companies.

------
paulbjensen
Can't comment on Ruby, but in relation to Node.js in London it's very much a
seller's market at the moment; good developers with commercial experience are
contracting at £550pd, and very few are interested in taking permanent roles.

It's a good time to be a software developer in London, and not so good if
you're trying to recruit one.

------
marklit
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 contractors always
being in work' 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?

~~~
stevenwilkin
I've had the same experience with a constant stream of freshly minted
recruiters want to add me on LinkedIn each and every week.

I've done contract Rails dev in London for the past 2 years now, before that I
had clients in the South of England, Dublin and Belfast. Apart from holidays
I've not spent any considerable time out of work.

------
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.

------
cssmoo
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.

~~~
Iftheshoefits
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.

~~~
cssmoo
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.

~~~
JAlexoid
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.

~~~
louishk
How much / what sort of financial experience is required?

~~~
cssmoo
Incidentally bugger all in most cases I reckon unless you're working in
trading. There's a bit of a vacuum at the moment so standards are low. Most
orgs are willing to drag you through the relevant training.

In all my years of working in the financial sector (NOT trading I will add!),
about as complex as it got was numeric precision, rounding, equation of a line
and curve fitting which was all pretty easy. Oh and deciphering lots of poorly
written regulation and rules.

Don't hit trading unless you like snorting coke and 100 hour weeks.

------
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.

------
toyg
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.

~~~
mattmanser
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 was £250 p/d.

You earn £900 p/d consulting, not developing.

I've always blamed the 'BBC micro' effect for our lower pay, we had a lot more
exposure to computers as kids in the 80s and so reached 'peak developer' a lot
later than the Americans did. Also in the UK the idea that the peons could be
worth more than the managers was anathema until the last decade, a class
divide throwback.

~~~
heidar
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.

~~~
JAlexoid
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.

~~~
functionalfoo
Rates in london for developers are usually under 500 day for non-finance, and
anywhere between 500-700 for finance, and maybe 700-800 if you have some quant
dev work in finance. You can get higher rates outside dev, for example Project
Mgr is around 700 day, and Programme Mgr around 900 day.

Occasionally, there are much higher rates (1k-2k) for very short urgent roles,
but not that common.

------
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.

~~~
livaliva
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?

