Hey guys,
How do you find the demand for Ruby/Rails in 2022? Less and less projects are available and although e.g HackerRank still has it as available language to do the coding challenges, a lot of similar sites have dropped it.
Are you worried? What's your take on it?
Please mention the country your are from as well if possible. I'm based on London, UK and while there is still demand for Ruby services here, I feel like it's fading.
Top comments (7)
I feel so, too. Rails is still used as backend, but many companies using Ruby on Rails are replacing their frontend stacks with TypeScript/JavaScript.
I mean I'm ok with that as Rails is not great on the FE side. But do you feel like Ruby is slowly fading as a whole?
I think the whole job market for developers shrank a bit in past few months, with news about layoffs from big companies etc. I don't think this is particularly stronger in Ruby than in other languages (I heard similar sentiments from Go community, for example).
That being said, of course Ruby and Rails will have its problems with keeping to be a popular choice because:
Agree 100%. Very curious which other framework is as quick as RoR to send a prototype on the market? I still haven't seen one yet. Yeah everything is JS nowadays but that is bad news for salaries because companies know they have where to pick from therefore won't need to pay too much. The bad news for those who have years of experience in Ruby is that even if they jump ship they will be swimming against the tide, as they can't really compete with those who have the same number of years experience in the tech they switch to. What's your take on it?
I don't know. At some point it really does not count how many experience you have with a given language, rather how experienced backend developer you are in general. Tech becomes secondary. Experienced Ruby devs might have an advantage here over frontend devs forced to do full stack in Node, because they "already know the language".
But yes, changing your main tech is not easy. Been there.
Well, YMMV of course, but I'd say Phoenix, probably some stuff on top of Next.js, maybe Django (although I haven't touched Django in years, so I don't really know). In general there's plenty of "Rails clones" that started to live their own life and make their own innovations (like LiveWire from Laravel that was actually ported to Rails as Hotwire).
Next.JS I tried and yes it does help spin up something quick but I've not actually used it with a DB, just pure React. Phoenix never tried. How long did it take you to make the transition? And is the market better now with your new tech? Was it Elixir?
Yes, I moved from Ruby to Elixir. The job market is much smaller, but growing + Ruby can still be my backup plan, should something bad happen :P