All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

The Argument From Deafening Silence

chromatic on 2008-01-14T04:49:25

To those that would use the number of Rails-related listings on major job boards as evidence of opportunity limitations, I point out that due to extraordinary demand for Ruby talent in the marketplace, it is almost pointless to advertise Ruby job positions via conventional channels.

— Obie Fernandez, About Rails and Ghettoes

I'm not sure lack of statistical evidence is exactly proof of popularity, at least for anyone who remembers the in Internet technology business scene of 1999.

Rails is still in the Koolaid phase...

Alias on 2008-01-14T06:14:25

I've certainly noticed a few gems like this floating around the Rails community, and this lot adds another two to the collection.

My previous standout was walking into the end of the Rails talk by accident at OSCON thinking it was the room for my PPI talk, and hearing the first audience question, "I hear Rails can have a problem integrating with other systems, what do you think?" to which the Rails guy replied, "Well our position is that we provide a complete development, so you won't need to integrate with anything. So Rails doesn't have any problems with integration".

It's almost like MySQL's rants about how referential integrity isn't necesary...

I flipped the bozo bit, turned around and walked out.

Re:Rails is still in the Koolaid phase...

chromatic on 2008-01-14T07:24:20

It's almost like MySQL's rants about how referential integrity isn't necesary...

The difference is, and almost no one remembers this, that the primary customers for MySQL for the first handful of years (and MyISAM for fifteen, if I count properly) were data warehousers, for whom referential integrity is indeed unnecessary.

Re:Rails is still in the Koolaid phase...

lachoy on 2008-01-14T21:28:32

That used to be a Lotus/IBM line:

Customer: "How can I integrate my system with Notes?"

IBM: "Just use Notes."

Badly phrased

djberg96 on 2008-01-14T13:02:42

Yeah, not the best argument there, but I think what Obie was trying to say is that instead of advertising on job boards like Monster, most people looking for Rails developers post to Rails-centric sites like jobs.rubynow.com.

Peter Cooper posted 6 Ruby and Rails Job Sites that lists some others.

I'm not following that closely but I don't get the impression (based on blogs, mailing lists, and chatting with people at the conferences) that RoR developers are having a hard time finding jobs. FWIW, the ThoughtWorks folks don't seem to be having any problems finding contracts.

Re:Badly phrased

chromatic on 2008-01-14T19:21:30

What you say is believable, and very much different from what Obie said.

Re:Badly phrased

diakopter on 2008-01-15T05:48:18

is it just me, or does jobs.rubynow.com bear more than a passing resemblance to jobs.perl.org?

Re:Badly phrased

Aristotle on 2008-01-15T08:08:02

No, it’s not just you…

Re:Badly phrased

TeeJay on 2008-01-16T10:20:41

The difficulty of finding developer/jobs has very little to do with the numbers and everything to with the proportion of supply to demand.. which means that nothing said at conferences or on blogs proves that there are a lot of jobs or developers - merely that the very small number of each are in a happy balance.

I still think the number of ruby jobs is insignificant - the vast majority of ruby developers are trying it out for small projects/fun/etc or working for one of the handful of Rails specialists.

On the WAUK list I think we have 1 RoR developer, and he's not even using it for his day job, on that and other lists I've seen a total of 1 RoR job posted versus countless PHP, and plenty of python and perl (a disproportianate number of Plone people are on the bristol underscore list).