Hacker News Reader

Comment by cutler | Hacker News Reader

I've been stuck on the horns of this dilemma for a while, at least for choice of a scripting language. Ruby and Python adoption is pretty similar if you're working in web devlopment rather than data science. In London the number of Rails and Django jobs is fairly equal. Agree, though, Python is racing adhead of Ruby in general and that makes me sad.

View on HN

From what I've seen, specifically-Ruby jobs tend to pay more than specifically-Python jobs (and more than specifically-Java jobs, for that matter), and while Rails and Django seem kinda balanced in some areas, in others Rails beats the tar out of Django for startup market share.

I don't know about that. Search angel.co and you'll find 36 hits for Ruby on Rails/London and 50 for Django/London. Same ratio on Indeed.co.uk/London.

There's an iceberg of Ruby jobs that don't exist in the most obvious places to search, and because other languages have gained more spotlight (including anything that even smells of ECMAScript) there are fewer people searching for Rails jobs so the number of Rails jobs is pretty well matched to the number of job-seeking Rails devs. Also, early stage startups tend to hire from people they know, not from job search sites. Finally, there are many "full stack" jobs where work on the backend means Rails.

A simplistic metric like "job listings on angel.co" (especially if you're specifically looking for Rails in the job posting title) don't tell the whole story.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com