Hacker News Reader

Comment by solatic | Hacker News Reader

> But I imagine Rails is being increasingly dismissed by newbie developers as being obsolete and not-cool. Mature companies may realize it's in their best interest to communicate that their boring-tech works just fine and that they have no plan on changing to cool-tech. If it's true, then someone's got to say it, right?

That's precisely the problem. If engineers were a dime a dozen, then Rails could be a great choice. Boring tech is a great place for businesses to be, in theory. Back here in reality, finding engineers is pretty hard, and the ones who we can find, are all only interested in working with Cool New Shiny Toys. If we posted a Ruby ad, we wouldn't get any bites. It's not used here.

Boring tech is great, until it becomes a noose to hang yourself with.

View on HN

We've not had a big problem getting candidate streams of people who want to work with Ruby. In a way I don't mind having an implicit filter against people who only want to work with shiny new things, as we don't really want our platform filled with everyone's favorite shiny technologies any more than we need a shiny language to write a good-sized e-commerce web app.

> That's precisely the problem. If engineers were a dime a dozen, then Rails could be a great choice.

If engineers are hard to find then isn't using a framework that maximises developer productivity the way to go? Rails definitely falls into that category.

Related, we recently advertised for Rails and React engineers. We had about the same number of applicants for each position but the Rails engineer quality was in general higher than the React engineer quality.

> If engineers are hard to find then isn't using a framework that maximises developer productivity the way to go? Rails definitely falls into that category.

Languages are not like cars. You cannot take a professional Rust engineer and drop him into a Ruby environment and expect him to be immediately highly productive, as if you were switching him from a Miata to a Ferrari. Languages need to be learned all over again, their ecosystem needs to be learned, beginner code needs to be reviewed by someone senior who is more familiar with the language. You can't just make an executive decision to go with Ruby because it has a reputation for productivity and expect immediate productivity gains.

> If engineers were a dime a dozen, then Rails could be a great choice.

Are they not, though? The narrative is that there's simultaneously too many engineers coming out of school and yet it's extraordinarily difficult to hire engineers. Which is it? Or are most engineers really that bad that they're unhirable?

> Back here in reality, finding engineers is pretty hard, and the ones who we can find, are all only interested in working with Cool New Shiny Toys.

I definitely believe you, but I wonder how much of this is self-fulfilling. Maybe a lot of engineers get into cool-tech because more jobs are demanding it, and their perception is they'll be quickly obsolete if they work with boring-tech. Most newbs seem to look towards startups first, which are going to be using cool-tech a lot of the time, but there seems to actually be a lot of interest on HN in working with boring-tech at either nontech companies or BigCo.

It's not hard to hire an engineer that can take a ruby on rails project and run with it. There's mountains of tutorials and books about it. You don't need the best of the best for this.

Some people have decided that that isn't good enough for their company though.

No language book can genuinely teach you the ecosystem for that language. The ecosystem is many times larger than could ever possibly fit into one book, but the ecosystem is what provides you with the libraries you actually reach for to build things day-to-day.

Expecting engineers to self-teach from a book is practically begging for NIH syndrome and a rewrite in two years.

> The narrative is that there's simultaneously too many engineers coming out of school and yet it's extraordinarily difficult to hire engineers. Which is it?

It's both. You need to be a large company to hire junior talent. The local market is mostly startups without well-developed production guardrails and well-gardened, too long backlogs. The large companies cherry-pick for the relatively few junior positions that open and they aren't using Ruby internally. Thus the Ruby ecosystem hasn't developed here.

> but there seems to actually be a lot of interest on HN in working with boring-tech at either nontech companies or BigCo.

HN trends senior talent which has been around the bloc enough times to know that stacks change and people don't. Most of the labor market comes into interviews and want to impress you with how many languages they know.

I bet you wouldn’t hire me, even though I am a very competent developer with a long resume. The problem is narrow minded hiring. I have never had problem hiring good people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com