Ruby on Rails: Opportunity in a Financial Downturn | Hacker News Reader

Ruby on Rails: Opportunity in a Financial Downturn

blog.fiveruns.com

16 pointsqhoxie6 comments

I agree that Rails developers will probably still have plenty of work in the downturn. But, then again, Django & PHP developers may also.

However, I'm not sure I buy the argument that the work will come from corporate IT projects.

FTA: "First of all, while we fully expect some CIOs to delay or cancel some internal IT projects."

I agree–you'll see a lot of canceled and delayed projects. But, I think it takes quite a bit more to convince a corporate CIO to outsource the development AND hosting of an internal project.

Maybe I've been out of the corporate world for too long (it's been 8 years), but in my experience, a CIO would rather put a project on hold than a) get up to speed on Rails, b) put a project out to bid, and/or c) worry about the perceived risks of having corporate data on external servers (especially in the case of financial, healthcare, or edu entities).

Yeah I think the posts about Rails developers doing fine during the downturn applies to any of the fast growing scripting languages. Certainly Python, I am less sure about the current growth of PHP.

People are really working to find and hire Ruby/Rails devs in SF and Boulder

What's the best way to learn about these openings?

I am looking to relocate in the next month and I want to get into Rails development (as in, for money as opposed to a hobby).

If you or anyone can give advice (particularly about these two attractive locales), shoot me a note at jraines@gmail.com

The Ruby meetup in SF is huge. There are also smaller more elite Ruby groups in SF if you can find them. Out there it seems there is a large need for good Ruby talent, so if your good you just need to get the word out in the Ruby community.

Boulder has the Bouler.me ( http://boulder.me ) going on but I think it just ended. Otherwise there is a Boulder Ruby meetup and the Boulder New TechMeetup both of which would be great places to look. I will keep an ear open for Rails specific work in Boulder.

We can simply look at the last downturn, which took place only seven years ago or so. Having worked for an open source company back then, it was most definitely not a time of opportunity. The company managed to survive, but salaries were cut for everyone, very few people were hired and investments were nearly impossible to get.

Maybe it was even worse for people working in Java or .Net, maybe not (many of them do government work etc which is less affected by the market) but it was certainly not a boom time for anyone.

I'm a Rails fanboy, but that doesn't fool me into thinking that's what will make or break my success in this market. This is a time to be a good programmer in any language.

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