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Where are the Rails developers?

I came across an interesting post on Chad Fowler’s blog where he uses the (decidedly unscientific) Google Trends to analyse supply/demand of technologies.

What was very interesting was this chart showing Ruby on Rails interest by region. South Africa is no 2! WTF?! If there’s so much interest here, why does no-one answer my job ads? Hell, our last ad actually advertised for PHP developers looking to learn Rails - we’ll train them! That’s how much we want Rails developers.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 8:29 am and is filed under Programming, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Where are the Rails developers?”

  1. Stii Says:
    April 5th, 2007 at 11:50 am

    Hey Nic,

    The fact that you are willing to take on non-Rails experts and train them in Rails seems like a fantastic opportunity! I for one would love to take this opportunity, but I have my own business and are tied down in George, so for me to relocate is not really an option. Pity, since I would have loved the opportunity!

    As a matter of interest, where did you advertise? I cannot imagine any PHP devs NOT grabbing opportunities like these!

  2. Nic Says:
    April 5th, 2007 at 11:53 am

    Admittedly our advertising has all been of the cheap or no-cost variety, eg gumtree, our own website, clug, etc, but there’s been ZERO interest. I refuse to pay employment agencies extortionate fees, so next step is a paid ad on careerweb.co.za.

  3. Stii Says:
    April 5th, 2007 at 12:35 pm

    So as a matter of interest, what do you offer money wise? Is it a contractual job or a permanent position?

  4. Nic Says:
    April 5th, 2007 at 12:41 pm

    A permanent position. We’re hoping to find someone with 2-4 yrs of experience, with PHP plus random other languages. My posting to CLUG is at http://lists.clug.org.za/pipermail/clug-work/2007-March/000341.html

  5. Neil Blakey-Milner Says:
    April 5th, 2007 at 1:18 pm

    While I’m not the biggest fan of Ruby or Ruby on Rails, I might’ve bitten if I didn’t already have a job programming Python.

    Finding _any_ sort of good programmer is hard at the moment - it’s not that the skills don’t exist, but that they’re generally already deployed and they’re not the ones getting fired or made to leave.

    Two of my former employers have spent months looking for good PHP programmers - you’d think there’d be more of them around given that there are more PHP programmers out there - but they’ve met with pretty low interest, and the interest they did get wasn’t of the standard they wanted.

    So, don’t give up, and be sure it’s not that your choice of technology is limiting you. (I’d hate to see someone regress to a lowest-common-denominator language…)

    Neil

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