Hacker News Reader

Comment by brandall10 | Hacker News Reader

As a Rails dev from 2011-2018, having returned over the past year, it def seemed there was an exodus in or around 2015.

Part of it was due to the rise of SPA and Rails difficulty working with those (webpacker, anyone?), part due to poor perception of Rails 4, part due to newer options such as Elixir/Phoenix or Golang rising in popularity for backend work, part due to many of the leaders such as Yehuda Katz moving on.

Also watching from afar on HN, it seems like Rails 7 release was perceived as a sort of comeback, with quite a few articles posted in recent years praising the framework for a return to relevance.

View on HN

Tried GoLang and also used Phoenix for a massive project which went well. But we had problems onboarding new folks into it and some junior and even senior engineers went bonkers trying to get their heads around FP and the elixir language in general. I would say it worked great for me, but the problems and the curve of learning for others in my team made it feel like Elixir creates that gap for teams in general.

Go is good, but again I only tried it long ago and can't comment it for what it is today. I loved Ruby but I find it hard to go back to it after my experience with Elixir and Typescript. I was hoping for Crystal to go to great lengths but it doesn't seem to be the case at all.

You do need to set some rule when onboarding people into an Elixir application. Not everything needs to be a GenServer, and please don't endlessly nest Enum.map calls.

I also noticed an elitism from other devs when it comes to Rails devs. I literally heard on multiple occasions "we don't hire Rails devs here!" followed by a laugh.

Of course it was tongue in cheek, if the candidate is amazing yes they're a hire.

But it spoke to a reputation that Rails devs had seemingly received. I think because prior to JS/Node, it was Rails that offered newbies the fastest path into web dev.

I don't believe this is the reason for any sort of exodus, but the negative perception may be partly a reason for devs choosing other frameworks.

> part due to newer options such as Elixir/Phoenix or Golang rising in popularity for backend work

I suspect Django and Laravel have taken a chunk of the market as like for like replacements.

Doubtful experienced devs moved to them. Attended many user groups and conferences during those years and both were seen as “lesser than”. Not unusual to see pot shots taken in presentation slides.

Elixir/Phoenix were embraced with excitement due to Jose’s connection to the community and the ruby like syntax.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com