Looking for a Job? Learn Ruby, Python and be a Team Player (infographic)

"above average team player" vs "average team player" literally made me laugh out loud. This whole infographic just an advert for mixtent. No real data posted? Simply percentages and rankings? At a minimum they could have included the sample size.

I was wondering the same thing. The most generous interpretation I can give Mixtent is that the survey asked its respondents to rate these developers as team players and then found that those developers who tended to be ranked as above average team players also tended to be ranked as better overall engineers. But in general, this "finding" destroyed all credibility the article might have had with me.

Your point #2 is not at all what this data implies. It shows that when presented with two LinkedIn profiles, users chose one developer over another. In that effort, Mixtent found a correlation showing that Python and Java developers were strongly favored in these comparisons.

Hiring decisions aren't typically made in the same way. If you have a Rails app, you need a Ruby developer. Granted, anyone can learn Rails, but I've worked with really talented people who were in the process of learning the Rails framework, and it's not something I'd like to pay for again.

> Is Mixtent wrong?

Their raw data may or may not be accurate, it's impossible to say because they fail to present the raw data or detail their methodology.

Their interpretation of the results is at best simplistic and incomplete, and their post title is absolutely wrong.

I don't think they would say "Nope! next?" but there is a really good chance they would be using Python and not Ruby. But that shouldn't matter if that person is a programmer as language semantics can be learned by any decent programmer.

No. Competent companies don't hire people for "Python" or "Ruby" per se. But the Ruby developer community is disproportionately well-stocked with web "programmers" who know enough Ruby + JQ + "SQL" (read: AR) to make good-looking, fairly functional websites.

It is easy to shoot these superficial programmers down, even from a cursory browse of a resume.

It's not that Ruby signals that you're a superficial programmer; it's that there are fewer superficial Python devs, and more superficial Ruby devs.

For the most part, your choices of programming language are a terrible way to differentiate or market yourself. You are far better off being clever about picking your application domain.

I use rails a lot and I don't know much about the methodology used, but some of my non-rails coworkers have said that they view a lot of rails guys as prima donnas. The DHH "fuck you" slide and Zed Shaw's massive flameout probably contribute to that perception too.

Given that another big influence was ability to be a team-player then I can see how ruby guys are perceived lower on the list.

P.S. I have been a long-time Ruby user, and use it frequently for sysadmin/devops/proof-of-concept type stuff. I am not, however, a "Ruby guy" and would list it on my resume along with Python.

I thought the content of you comment was interesting (and sounds like interviewing with you might be pretty cool), but the tone was really harsh and unlikely to spark any interesting conversation. Something like this might have worked a bit better:

"It's not the language that matters when looking for a job, it's important that you convince me you know what you're talking about. Show me something I didn't know, then convince me it's worth knowing. Demonstrate you know big 'O' notation (and maybe even tell me how little 'o' and \omega are different). Draw me a binary search tree. Show me how a skip list works. Fill in a multithreaded producer / consumer skeleton and get it correct, then make it fast. Explain how UTF-8 works from first principles (i.e. what's wrong with ASCII? How would you fix it? Now how do you optimise the answer?)

Python and Ruby are both trendy right now, and interesting in their own right, but we don't write anything in either language and likely never will. The underlying technical/CS understanding is not only more important, but common to almost all problems."

seems like you really like the guys who can memorize "cracking the coding interview" and "data structures for interviews"!

I don't think companies are doing that. The causality just isn't being addressed properly.

I can come up with a lot of plausible reasons why you're more likely to find "good" engineers focusing on Python or Java, and why Ruby developers might be more cross-disciplined, and none of them are because the engineers are defined by the language.

This "study" is laughably poor in presentation, and their interpretation of the results they got is almost certainly unforgivably flawed.

I agree with you and what really takes the cake away from taking their research as reliable and valid is not only that they skimmed over any kind of educational background and programming concepts (for the sake of the argument I'll assume that they consider them as granted) but calling out loud that engineers that work for Microsoft are worse than the rest is to my eyes a sad generalization that is used just to pinch nerves and win smiles from people who consciously and for reasons of their own don't like Microsoft products (myself being one of them).

That would be like hiring designers based on whether they know photoshop or coreldraw.

False dichotomy. You can be a programmer who "knows their stuff" and also know the right languages.

I think the same, it seems that text is too small. Also I don't like 'generic engineer Charlie' vs 'teamworking python engineer Anthony' - no info in this particular part of graphic, just noise taking up half of a box. I'm not sure if those pie charts are a good idea either - it seems that they are rather discouraged (there was a post on HN few months ago discussing it), and making them half-a-pie-charts make them even more confusing.

If you're wrong in that train of thought, that makes two of us. I just landed my 2nd new job this year, and both new jobs were in .Net development(the first one was a 6-month consulting gig that just ended last week). I don't think it's going away anytime soon.

I can say for certain that the demand for solid .NET devs is really high in the Philadelphia area right now. I am constantly bombarded from recruiters, and now even old employers that are offering me new positions. Beyond this, I've actually gotten a chance to look at some resumes over the last 2-3 months and it seems that the typical applicant who gets at least a decent consideration isn't even all that skilled or experienced.

On the other hand, when I was searching for a new position some 7 to 8 months ago, the few python places here seemed to have unrealistic expectations of their applicants.

I think this survey is dumb. How do we know the first question is not really a "do you think the light-skinned engineer is better than the dark skinned one?"

Also: Any potential client that would rank an engineer's quality based on his programming language alone, is a client to stay away from. These would be the execs who read a magazine in a flight and suddenly think they know how programming works.

So who cares if your language (assuming you are a one language person, which is a different topic onto itself) is perceived as "bad"? There are many world-class engineers that code in shitty languages, or languages that are full of shitty programmers. Programming language alone proves nothing.

I think all of this is just some more skippable junk being added to the web.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that yes, you are perceived to be a better programmer based on your language. What happens after that very first impression? Can you show yourself to be an incompetent ass after stating your flashy language? What if you smell bad? What if you have an annoying voice, or an obnoxious laugh?

Junk, I tell you! This is useless junk.