Thursday, May 15, 2008

Where are the ruby jobs?

In my current job I get in touch with a lot of heavy-weight (if not obese!) Java projects.

Not being overly happy with those kind of projects (along with them comes usually legacy and overhead of all kinds, out-dated technology ... and little fun), I am wondering if there are any alternatives in enterprise application development.

In my current naive view, Ruby could be such an alternative. Ruby On Rails as a prototype of lightweight web development appears fresh and sexy. It is still a playground for alpha-geeks, but ready for the enterprise at the same time.
Not beeing mainstream means that it can attract new and innovative but not dead-critical projects. Where you can achieve a lot with little overhead... thats where the fun lies!

According to indeed.com there should be a real demand for Ruby programmers.


Compared to Java and .NET:


But this trend seems not to be reflected here in Switzerland:

  • Search for 'ruby' yields 3 hits on monster.ch.
  • The same search on hays.ch yields 5 hits, but none of them in Switzerland.
  • Searches for 'rails', 'groovy' or 'seam' have less or even no hits...

  • It seems I have to keep looking ...

    4 comments:

    1. Look at Seaside too (http://seaside.st) - the portable Smalltalk-based web-continuation framework... it's definitely getting hotter by the day, and will probably surpass Rails soon.

      ReplyDelete
    2. Most of the Ruby on Rails work in the world is consulting, not in the enterprise or startup markets.

      Although there are more and more jobs in those environments the vast majority are still Java/.Net/PHP, and the people taking corporate positions are typically very Jr.

      This is due to the fact that as a Sr. Rails consultant you can make over $100 an hour, and you will never get that at a company.

      ReplyDelete
    3. I wonder how much you will have in maintaining rails project and with no tests with badly written code :P

      java is not that bad and its safer.

      ReplyDelete
    4. @Anonymous2:
      Well it is part of the point, that maintenance for rails projects is not yet a real issue :-)
      You would have to jump on the next bandwagon when it becomes an issue ...
      (I know this is not a professional attitude, but hey why not have fun? :-)

      ReplyDelete

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