

Ruby Developers Don't Scale - swombat
http://railsontherun.com/2008/8/27/ruby-developers-don-t-scale

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thomasmallen
Being from San Diego, it appears the writer has more than one thing in common
with Ron Burgundy:

"Anyways, I have been quite busy preparing courses for classes I gave to a
bunch a great Engineers at one of the Fortune 100 companies based in San
Diego. I was also planning my big vacation trip to Europe and wrapping up few
projects."

Translates to:

"I don't know how to put this but I'm kind of a big deal. People know me. I'm
very important. I have many leather-bound books and my apartment smells of
rich mahogany."

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rcoder
This is a theme I'm hearing from a number of directions these days: namely,
that Rails has (deservedly) attracted a lot of attention for web development,
and tempted a lot of people from the PHP and Java camps into doing Ruby, but
hasn't produced nearly as large a crop of expert Ruby developers as one might
hope.

The basic fact is that a year or two of Rails development experience doesn't
make you a good architect, systems programmer, or database administrator. Good
back-end engineers are much rarer, and should command a premium, if only
because such knowledge really does only come from years of hard-earned
experience.

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pjackson
Oh, I dunno. I think you can get more done with a small group of super-smart
guys the you could with a big group of mediocre ones (isn't that already an
axiom?)

I think the client in this story tried to staff up the way a big waterfall or
java project typically scales up: hire as many cogs as you can and give them
each a little module to work on. In essence, they want a big group of mediocre
developers.

A bummer, but perhaps a failing of the consultant. With any adoption of new
technology or process, you have to prep the client for uncomfortable changes.
Like paying more to fewer developers, or starting work without a 300 line mpp
project plan, or whatever.

Sometimes in our roles as consultants, that's the most important job.

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LogicHoleFlaw
_[...] you just need to get one or two great ruby guys (who will probably cost
you a lot) and find a bunch of smart people to train. You'll end up with an
awesome team of scalable rubyists ;)_

Sounds like a good strategy for many endeavors.

