functionalfoo

You can learn brush up on the terminology pretty quickly - the IBs will hire any solid developers who know their platform well enough (so java devs who appreciate core java + modern ecosystem; python devs who have experience with scipy/numpy etc. A big part though is willingness to jump in and remain for a while, to be able to tolerate the mindless processes and procedures that come with massive companies in a regulated industry.

Rates in london for developers are usually under 500 day for non-finance, and anywhere between 500-700 for finance, and maybe 700-800 if you have some quant dev work in finance. You can get higher rates outside dev, for example Project Mgr is around 700 day, and Programme Mgr around 900 day.

Occasionally, there are much higher rates (1k-2k) for very short urgent roles, but not that common.

Burnt in the sense that businesses hired people who claimed to have solid development experience, who claimed they could build robust maintainable systems, who claimed they could solve real business problems, who then turned out to be a lot less spectacular or solid than first thought, who believed the solution to every problem or design phase was to simply add more gems into the mix, who changed the whole state of the codebase because one luminary in the ruby world posted a blog article about how the hot thing on that day was to use pattern x instead of pattern y for designing your models vs controllers.

Most businesses are technology agnostic - they don't care what we use, if, if we deliver robust technically sound solutions. But when they trust developers, who fail to deliver, they mark the technology choice as well, to avoid getting similar problems in the future.

The truth is not nice, but here it goes:

A lot of companies got burnt on ruby related projects. Especially anything rails related. There is a steady pipeline of work right now for skilled developers to migrate services and code from ruby to go, Scala, java - basically anything else except ruby.

I have earnt quite well doing such gigs, although I tend do more erlang/elixir stuff these days.

I would always ask the clients what happened, and why they want to migrate rather than maintain or even build out their ruby code bases, and the answer was always the same - the developers in the ruby space were mostly sub-par. Often several degrees below java developers in terms of skill and ability. I would say it tallies with my experiences too.

It is also for this reason they are not using node js - because it was seen as the next shiny, all the half-devs from ruby jumped onto it, and the risk of crap codebases from the same amateurs is ever present.