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Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

Love this post, although:

    Ruby is easy to hire for

I've always had the opposite experience!

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In my time at Stripe, few of the candidates were fluent in Ruby, but it almost always took less than a couple weeks to get spun up with it. If you're looking for Ruby talent, it's more challenging.

I've worked at places that hire folks with Ruby experience only (more difficult) and places that just hired the best available engineer and let them learn Ruby (easier but EXTREMELY mixed results - specifically lots of Java ppl insisting on writing Ruby that looks like Java and insisting upon using e.g. Spring conventions in Rails)

This is super common, (and the mark of a bad programmer if you program the same in every language). What's funny is the opposite - people who get so into ruby that everything they write is cute and overthought - is actually worse.

Ruby is so powerful but simplicity is the best if other people are going to read and maintain your code. Go is great for this.

    Ruby is so powerful but simplicity is the best if 
    other people are going to read and maintain your code.

Amen. Keep it simple for a large shared Ruby application, such as a Rails app.

More advanced Ruby (writing your own operators/iterators/whatever, metaprogramming, extending the language itself, whatever) is best reserved for Ruby frameworks, not applications.

As someone experienced in Ruby (and Rails), I've also always had the opposite experience. Very little options!

There haven't been a ton of choices when I've looked for Ruby/Rails jobs, but I never had much trouble landing one. They usually seem pretty relieved to have found somebody.

When I've been on the hiring side of the equation, it's been very tough to find candidates.

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