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I'm not qualified to respond to your points about Phusion and mongrel but on the previous point about the size of the community, are you also finding as a result that the job market for Ruby positions is sparse (forgetting about the economy for a second)? That's the impression I have from the job boards but you work in the field so maybe you have a better idea.

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Actually, there's plenty of Rails work out there, and usually in higher rates than PHP (granted, you do accomplish more work per Rails hour).

It seems to me most Rails jobs are either for companies who chose Ruby because they really know their stuff, which is great, or companies who chose Rails because 2 years ago it was touted as some sort of Web app pixie dust in Wired Magazine, which is often less fun :)

I wasn't sure whether the latter firms had found some new pixie dust by now. Good to know. Obie Fernandez has a talk online somewhere about billing where he says something like no one working in Rails should bill less than $150/hour and that he bills himself and his developers at $250 but will occasionally give discounts for various reasons. Maybe I have numbers wrong - just found it - http://www.infoq.com/presentations/fernandez-sales-do-the-hu...

I recommend watching it. Good talk. Takeaway point - always err on the side of charging too much :)

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