> If engineers were a dime a dozen, then Rails could be a great choice.
Are they not, though? The narrative is that there's simultaneously too many engineers coming out of school and yet it's extraordinarily difficult to hire engineers. Which is it? Or are most engineers really that bad that they're unhirable?
> Back here in reality, finding engineers is pretty hard, and the ones who we can find, are all only interested in working with Cool New Shiny Toys.
I definitely believe you, but I wonder how much of this is self-fulfilling. Maybe a lot of engineers get into cool-tech because more jobs are demanding it, and their perception is they'll be quickly obsolete if they work with boring-tech. Most newbs seem to look towards startups first, which are going to be using cool-tech a lot of the time, but there seems to actually be a lot of interest on HN in working with boring-tech at either nontech companies or BigCo.
> The narrative is that there's simultaneously too many engineers coming out of school and yet it's extraordinarily difficult to hire engineers. Which is it?
It's both. You need to be a large company to hire junior talent. The local market is mostly startups without well-developed production guardrails and well-gardened, too long backlogs. The large companies cherry-pick for the relatively few junior positions that open and they aren't using Ruby internally. Thus the Ruby ecosystem hasn't developed here.
> but there seems to actually be a lot of interest on HN in working with boring-tech at either nontech companies or BigCo.
HN trends senior talent which has been around the bloc enough times to know that stacks change and people don't. Most of the labor market comes into interviews and want to impress you with how many languages they know.
It's not hard to hire an engineer that can take a ruby on rails project and run with it. There's mountains of tutorials and books about it. You don't need the best of the best for this.
Some people have decided that that isn't good enough for their company though.
No language book can genuinely teach you the ecosystem for that language. The ecosystem is many times larger than could ever possibly fit into one book, but the ecosystem is what provides you with the libraries you actually reach for to build things day-to-day.
Expecting engineers to self-teach from a book is practically begging for NIH syndrome and a rewrite in two years.
Are they not, though? The narrative is that there's simultaneously too many engineers coming out of school and yet it's extraordinarily difficult to hire engineers. Which is it? Or are most engineers really that bad that they're unhirable?
> Back here in reality, finding engineers is pretty hard, and the ones who we can find, are all only interested in working with Cool New Shiny Toys.
I definitely believe you, but I wonder how much of this is self-fulfilling. Maybe a lot of engineers get into cool-tech because more jobs are demanding it, and their perception is they'll be quickly obsolete if they work with boring-tech. Most newbs seem to look towards startups first, which are going to be using cool-tech a lot of the time, but there seems to actually be a lot of interest on HN in working with boring-tech at either nontech companies or BigCo.