This has been my experience. Very painful
315 karma · joined June 18, 2013
This has been my experience. Very painful
I think you would be insane to start a new project with them today. Which is crazy for me to say, as I was one of their biggest fans for the last decade.
Many Canadians who got computer science degrees left to work for American companies for 2x-3x more money.
I work more in web dev now and I suspect the majority of my team does not know the difference between a thread and a process. HN readers may scoff but these are productive engineers who have build some honestly pretty impressive apps and systems.
I also think generalists get pushed into management at a higher frequency. Not something I am personally interested in, but I get asked yearly at least at every role I have been at.
However, on very large Ruby projects I have inherited I do see a common flaw of a large (often insane) amount of exceptions being thrown due to type errors. Undefined method blah on nil class. Some of these apps have had 100s of developers working on them of various skill levels. For mission critical code paths I am often the biggest proponent of Sorbet.
While my personal projects involve heavy use of meta programming and taking advantage of duck typing, I have altered my writing style and opinions for large projects.
Part of my frustration with Ruby type system could be explained by the fact great Ruby developers are becoming pretty hard to come by and I have often had to work with developers who are picking it up.
I bought it used several years ago and with used car prices surging and vehicles that can be slept in going up in value, I suspect its gained around $2000 of value.
Its slow but has major utilitarian charm.
Just because after years of being in both ecosystems I am ridiculously productive and don't fall into as many traps. With heroku in 30 mins I could have app deployed production ready with auth, CI, API, database setup, and deployment pipeline.
Will this slow down a lot of early retirement plans? Almost certainly. However the market is not 0, lots of these people still have substantial amounts of money saved.