[tavrobel]

My guess is that they are the flavor of the month (knowing only Rails+JS is widely employable), and have a low enough barrier to entry that you can realistically teach someone enough to be useful in the timescale of a bootcamp. Add a little HTML/CSS and you can do front end as well.

I think the auto-magicness of Rails helps, since it gives you so much even if you are relatively inexperienced. Then you have a jumping off point, to start learning on the job, earning money and you can ostensibly choose your own adventure from there.

edit: I'm not sure what's objectionable about this comment. I'm new here and trying to be helpful, so if I've gone against some rule, I'd like to know so I can learn from it.

[cookiecaper]

Rails is not that employable anymore. Sure, you can find gigs for it in tech hotspots, but that's true for any language. For people living in the Real World outside of the tech bubbles, Rails jobs have mostly died out and been replaced with Node jobs.

[yellowapple]

I've actually seen the opposite in my own job searches (though I'm admittedly not actively searching for Node jobs); outside the tech bubbles, the programming jobs are mostly around enterprise stuff, which is far more likely to be centered around either the JVM or the .NET CLR. Rails is actually starting to catch on in these sectors, since it's gradually becoming "legacy" (which translates to "actually tried and true in production") while Node becomes the new hotness.

[cutler]

Not here in the UK. Agreed, most Rails jobs are in London but outside the capital PHP:Node is about 7:1 on Indeed.co.uk by job title and that's excluding WordPress, Drupal, Magento and Joomla.

[cookiecaper]

Yeah, PHP, .NET, and Java are always going to be king outside of the tech hubs. I'm saying that the niche that used to be occupied by Rails jobs is being/has been replaced by the niche now occupied by Node.js jobs.

Rails does not have the widespread appeal it used to -- it's not the hip new kid on the block like it was in 2005. At my employer, the people who handle Rails act like it's radioactive and are itching to replace it with more "modern" things.

[cutler]

Node:Rails is about 1.5 in London and 2.2 in the rest of the UK so, yes, Node seems to be more popular than Rails outside the capital. The complicating factor, however, may be the hiring culture in the Rails community. Because Ruby and Rails are so strong on community it may be that a lot more Rails vacancies are advertised informally. That's certainly been my experience.

[ksec]

Is that true though, it seems Multiple Survey said Rails and Ruby Jobs is still on the rise. And Scaling Ruby Rails is expensive.

[cookiecaper]

It's true in my experience trying to help a fresh boot camp grad find local employment. We even emailed the organizer of the local Rails user group and he said no one around here was hiring for it anymore. I'm in Central FL.

Haven't looked up the surveys so can't speak for them. I guess they'd be interesting? But unless they're excluding SF, SEA, NYC, and maybe Boston/Austin it's not really an equivalent comparison.