Comments on: Ruby developers don’t scale

By: Sean

Sean — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:58:00 +0000

I have 5 Ruby-only developers working on my team. Our project doesn’t have anything to do with web development, and we’ve "scaled" quite well.

By: web design company

web design company — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:58:00 +0000

Maybe companies should stop being cheap and should start ponying up the dough required to land real Ruby talent and of course this can be generalized: "Maybe companies should stop being cheap and should start ponying up the dough required to land real talent"

By: Glenn

Glenn — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:58:00 +0000

I’ve worked on quite a number .Net, Rails, and Java projects over my career, having to project manager a few hundred of them before ruby convinced me to go back to coding. I can categorically say that every ruby project bar one has worked out significantly cheaper than the equivalent would have in any other framework I’ve used, based on my experience.

I don’t think it necessarily has anything to do with the language per se, but more so the type of developers it attracts. Any project that has run over budget and schedule has been because we’ve ended up developing far beyond scope, and in all instances gone live with production ready code long before any gantt chart suggested we had to.

So I’d say Obie is right. You need to be persuasive enough to convince your client that one of the most important parts of the project is finding the right group of people. If you’d rather save money by hiring cheap developers, I’d rather not be working on it… or certainly wouldn’t want my name associated with the end result.

What is it they say about monkeys writing Shakespeare?

By: masukomi

masukomi — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:58:00 +0000

The problem you describe has nothing to do with scalability. The problem is AVAILability.

Ruby developers probably scale just as well as developers for any other language. In many cases I think Ruby lets you get more done from the same developer, but there just aren’t many of us. Also, your client’s statement that "you Ruby folks are too unavailable and difficult to work with! We need a committed team that actually cares about the company/product." is ludicrous when discussing hiring people. A) you don’t know if someone is difficult to work with until you’re working with them B) you can’t hire someone that’s committed to your company / product. You build commitment after hiring. He’s correct about availability though.

In short, this just boils down to the economics of supply and demand, and right now there’s very little supply. Also, in my experience, most developers don’t want to uproot themselves and move to a different state for a new job regardless of what language they develop in.

By: Ugly American

Ugly American — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:58:00 +0000

If the client had a clue they’d look at how many Java projects go over budget and behind schedule.

It doesn’t matter how many people you hire that can’t even read the instructions, quantity is not equal to quality.

By: Anthony Broad-Crawford

Anthony Broad-Crawford — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:58:00 +0000

Did you try any local Ruby or Ruby on Rails user groups? Meetup.com has one in almost every major city. We have scaled from three developers to eight developers in a Rails development shop. We leverage the meetup groups heavily, and most of our candidates come from their. However, our Meetup group has roughly sixty people in it. So we can be picky and choosy in regards to who we bring in.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:58:00 +0000

How high was salaries for Ruby FTEs?

By: Joe Grossberg

Joe Grossberg — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:58:00 +0000

You also seem to overlook the fact that the lion’s share of today’s Ruby developers *were* PHP or Java developers a few years ago. So hire the smartest PHP or Java guys. Have them learn Ruby.

And I question your decision to go with Merb (not even Rails?). That framework embodies a lot of good ideas, but writing someone’s app in a framework that is at the 0.9 stage, is lacking lots of features (moreso in DataMapper than Merb itself) and is (justifiably) breaking backwards-compatibility all the time is bordering on irresponsible.

By: Hates_

Hates_ — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:58:00 +0000

There is always Grails for those projects that have to be Java. A slightly less painful alternative at least.

By: Matt Aimonetti

Matt Aimonetti — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:58:00 +0000

@sean glad to hear you had a good experience, I’m sure loads of people do "scale" well, for instance [integrum](http://integrumtech.com) is doing very good with most employees who learned Ruby when they joined the company. But even people like [Hashrocket](http://hashrocket.com) have a hard time finding people sometimes.

@Glenn & @masukomi I totally agree with you.

@Ugly American true, at the same time, talented JAVA developers will be able to catch up and keep the project running. I’m not too worried about that. (I would have preferred them to keep on working on the Ruby code tho)

@Anthony Broad-Crawford I did, I’m actually very involved in the San Diego Ruby Group. But for some reason it was harder to find people in my client’s area. Also, they wanted a "Ruby Rock Star" to lead the group. Good comment for people trying to add more staff to their own team tho!

@Joe Grossberg I agree about hiring JAVA/Python guys. However a company needs a strong developer and they couldn’t find/afford one.

Regarding Merb, it’s an interesting story, we started with Rails but had to switch to Merb mainly for performance and flexibility reasons. Being myself an active the Merb contributor and knowing quite well both framework, the choice was obvious (I have an older post covering the speed difference for this app)

@Hates_ Grails is quite interesting, but if you are a JAVA developer and you love your environment, I can see that you don’t want to switch. Also, if you are willing to port an app to Grails, you’re almost better off leaving it in Ruby :p