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Comment by mixmastamyk | Hacker News Reader

It's a shame most of these type of desperate to hire startups in LA use Rails, while I've spent years on Python and Django. The industry might be better off if there were fewer choices in tech stacks, would make hiring and changing jobs easier.

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We are Rails based, but are happy to hire people with Python + Django experience too, if they are willing to learn. We have hired people before who didn't have much Rails experience but came with an overall solid background in programming and were able to pick up Rails pretty quickly.

I find it hard to believe that a Rails shop would not gladly hire an experienced Django developer, unless they were also wanting some "dev ops" duties that would benefit from direct experience with their stack.

I agree, I feel all the time I spended learning Django, Scala/Play, Go, Haskell, etc. is worthless because startups only hire Rails and iOS guys anyways.

Isn't Rails just web-tier stuff? I'm sure any decent startup is pretty much technology agnostic when it comes to developing the core services (or at least they should be). I'm sure that if you can write Python, Scala, Go and Haskell that Ruby shouldn't be much of an issue and Rails is something you can probably pick up in a week or two of fiddling around with it.

Yes.

Actually I was mostly joking, learning C and Haskell has greatly increased my hability to write code, even if it's other language.

And I'm not in the laboral world yet, so I have plenty of time to get used to Rails or any other technology, but it's right that at least of 75% of Startups are using Rails.

I started (as an intern) at the startup I work at now having never touched Ruby or Rails (other than to write maybe 10 lines total?) I started committing meaningful code within 3-4 days (working majorly part-time). I've written virtually the whole website, now, learning a lot of Javascript along the way, too. I also had no experience with Django or any other full-stack web framework. It's not that difficult.

It's not difficult to pick up a new web framework. The skills that matter transcend the flavor of the week.

I don't think it is difficult, just a waste of time (not rails specifically). If I'm already spreading myself too thin on ~20 technologies, adding N more doesn't help.

At some point (different for everyone I know) it pays to focus on a few things and get to the next level with them. I've already got a good job, but it would be nice to get "poached" once in a while. Fewer silos in the industry would help alleviate the hiring problem. Wishful thinking, I know.

They're not desperate. They're hustlers. And probably smart enough to hire a great Django hacker with zero Rails experience.

Was writing in general.

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