Rails isn't a ghetto, the sector's got lots of work, and Zed Shaw uses it every day wearing a tie and dress shirt | Hacker News Reader

Rails isn't a ghetto, the sector's got lots of work, and Zed Shaw uses it every day wearing a tie and dress shirt

blog.obiefernandez.com

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Translation/summary: Zed asked me to cover up for his angry rant. "All those profane indictments were actually just little jokes! He's an okay guy, really!"

All this just makes me want to learn Rails that much less. I progam with creating wealth in mind, not insane drama.

In reality, though, the interpersonal drama that plays out in the blogosphere does little to make any given framework more or less effective of a tool.

True.

I'd love to find some of those $200 and hour contracts... is he for real?

If Zed is working in Manhattan, that's probably pretty reasonable to assume. I doubt that you'd get that in Omaha, however.

Just googling around, doesn't seem to be a real number. For instance, the 4th google hit for "ruby on rails contract" says "This is a 2 month contract position paying $40/hour"

I know I just got through paying some RoR guys about twice that for some code monkey stuff. So the 40-80 range looks a lot more real than 200. Note that I'm not saying there isn't somebody out there making 200/hour, just it is not indicative of where the market is at. Heck, there's probably a few 200/hour COBOL programmers out there too, but that's not saying much for the idea of being a COBOL programmer. It's just an outlier.

Well, of course you can't find $100/hr being offered on a random job board. Nobody is crazy enough to hire an unknown quantity off the street at those rates, no matter what the demand is. See Spolsky, Joel: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDeveloper...

The people who are working for $100+/hr are getting those jobs directly from the companies that auditioned them at $40-$80 per hour, or from friends-of-friends of the managers at those companies.

He did specify that as the rate for "premium Rails talent", as opposed to $100+ for "average rails talent". Presumably he defines "premium talent" as lying somewhere between "'senior' in the job title" and "Rails Core member or equivalent"; where exactly I don't know.

Still, even a $125 an hour gig would be pretty awesome. Wouldn't mind leaving my mind-rotting intra-corp job for a few months of something like that. At least then I could work on the same platform as my startup - not only at night but all day.

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