Comment by lylo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lylo | Hacker News Reader

37signals | Rails programmer | Fully Remote (PST to CET)

37signals are hiring Rails programmers to work on our flagship products: Basecamp and HEY. We're accepting applications until June 6, 5pm US-Central time.

Everything at 37signals is built as a majestic monolith using Ruby on Rails and Hotwire for the front-end.

You'll be building new product features alongside a designer using our Shape Up methodology (https://basecamp.com/shapeup) as well as spending time addressing issues to make sure our apps are robust, and our codebase weed free.

We're a small team who get a lot done. The whole company runs on Basecamp, we work asynchronously with few meetings, and the company gets together IRL at meet-ups twice a year.

The salary for candidates matched as Programmer is $165,410. The salary for candidates matched as Senior Programmer is $197,819. Irrespective of where in the world you live.

More details on the job ad:

https://apply.workable.com/37signals/j/058F4B8348/

Feel free to get in touch directly if you have any questions: olly@37signals.com

> The salary for candidates matched as Programmer is $165,410. The salary for candidates matched as Senior Programmer is $197,819. Irrespective of where in the world you live.

Nice. Every ad should have (a) salary and (b) be a geo-irrelevant compensation package

For (b), would also be really awesome if they explained how they chose these numbers. Given how specific it is, a salary of 197,819 seems to be derived from some function (e.g. average salary for a senior engineer position in SF).

I believe it is Top 10% salary for a senior engineer position in SF using industry benchmarks. ( DHH used to tweet a lot about Remote )

Is Ruby on Rails experience mandatory? It appears to be an important requirement and application question.

Yes it is. The job ad states:

We’re looking for candidates with a strong track record of putting Rails to work and bringing products to life. You should be experienced in the framework, in Ruby, and with the staples of full-stack web development: HTTP, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

Thanks the the update. The reason I ask is because it severely limits the applicant pool.

For example, I have years of Django experience, and now I work fully in Nodejs/TS. Anecdotally, this is the case for a lot of people that I know. Moreover, I don’t see a situation where I can get deep RoR experience from the industry now.

Do you see this sentiment from other applicants? How are you getting enough RoR experts?

> How are you getting enough RoR experts?

This is very interesting. At my company we've had problems with finding senior Rails devs, which constrasts with the "great resignation" theory.

I think that the pool of senior RoR devs is restricting nowadays (due to the framework/language's loss of appeal), but the is a small number of Rails big techs (and famous companies, including 37signals) that are still very desirable, so they may not have problems in finding candidates.

Indeed, and presumably given DHH’s philosophy, 37signals intends to be in business for a very long time.

How will they ensure a stable pipeline of experienced RoR engineers?

Sidenote - IMO Django and RoR are unmatched in developer productivity - all modern alternatives have mind-numbing levels of boilerplate and bike shedding.

37signals will never have trouble hiring, they are so well known and respected.

My point is that the supply of RoR engineers is limited and dwindling. It’s not sustainable long term. Maybe 37Signals thinks otherwise…

You’re wrong, Rails is still very much alive. Also the idea of x language developer is outdated, as long as you know the language and framework and have done more than nothing with it there’s more flexibility these days especially for senior engineers.

Rails may very much be alive, but this thread began because strong RoR experience is mandatory for this role. This isn’t a generic discussion.

You need senior Rails devs? I could apply. What's the company?

Just a minor troll: I have 10+ yrs experience with Django, none with RoR. I suspect I could take a RoR position and do just fine, budgeting myself 5-10 hrs non-billed per week to get up the learning curve.

But why would I do that when all the evidence I've seen lately is that Python + Node are the present & future (maybe add go, rust), whereas RoR peaked years ago and is becoming a legacy/maintenance job? Why fill my head with that?

When is the last time anyone has heard of a company building from scratch on Ruby?

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