[joelbluminator]

Well there's all the companies that were built around 2006-2015 with Ruby, when Rails was hot stuff. Many of them can't afford migrating to a new stack, or want to. But generally I kinda agree - more is being created with other stack nowadays. A byproduct of that is way more people learn Python / Java as a first language, so you also perhaps need to think if being a Python guy gives you any edge when you turn 45-50 as hordes of young people learn it as we speak. Outsourcing a Python project is gonna be way easier 10 years from now than doing the same with Ruby. I don't have clear answers btw, there's just pros and cons.

[lmm]

> Well there's all the companies that were built around 2006-2015 with Ruby, when Rails was hot stuff. Many of them can't afford migrating to a new stack, or want to.

Right, so either you're working for a struggling company, or you're working on the old stack while things are gradually being migrated and most new stuff is being done in a different stack. Maybe you'd find a company that is sticking with Ruby because they like it, but that's pretty rare, and probably means that company hasn't scaled past a certain point.

> A byproduct of that is way more people learn Python / Java as a first language, so you also perhaps need to think if being a Python guy gives you any edge when you turn 45-50 as hordes of young people learn it as we speak. Outsourcing a Python project is gonna be way easier 10 years from now than doing the same with Ruby.

Well if it's hard to replace you in your current position then that cuts both ways. So you might be able to find a comfortable position, but there won't be much opportunity for growth.

[joelbluminator]

> Right, so either you're working for a struggling company, or you're working on the old stack while things are gradually being migrated and most new stuff is being done in a different stack

Well, currently I'm working for neither. Just a Ruby company that's doing well. I'm sure there's more of them. It's not as if the idea of a rewrite was never thrown, but honestly why would they? It would take years, all the while your old dev team needs to pick up a new language and your new hires need to pick up both Ruby and the rewrite language. If the whole architecture was service oriented that may be not too bad but many Ruby companies are running a few big monoliths. Besides, this whole idea of lack of Ruby jobs seems weird to me especially if you're from North America. Mainland Europe is a different beast though.

[lmm]

Well, if a company is successfully running a Ruby monolith without hitting the scaling problems that would make it start cutting out services to implement in other languages then that suggests the company either hasn't grown past a certain point, or isn't doing anything particularly heavy technically.

[joelbluminator]

That's a controversial topic though. Keep in mind that companies like Github and Shopify showed us it's damn well possible to scale massively with a monolith. But I take your point as being correct, there are quite a few Ruby companies who didn't reach Shopify/Stripe scale (is that a problem though? and if so - why?)

[lmm]

> there are quite a few Ruby companies who didn't reach Shopify/Stripe scale (is that a problem though? and if so - why?)

I think it makes for an environment that may be comfortable, but one where it's harder for a technical person to grow. It's not just about scaling, it suggests the company doesn't have major technical challenges - in which case the company probably isn't technically innovative (which doesn't make it a bad company or a bad business, but does make it a bad environment to pursue a purely technical career). Of course scaling isn't the only way to get interesting technical problems, but I've not seen people favour Ruby for heavy algorithmic work or anything like that either (though I'd stand to be corrected) - rather the great strength of Ruby is rapidly rolling out UI, so it tends to be chosen for problems where the UI is a large proportion of the thing you're building.

[joelbluminator]

> but I've not seen people favour Ruby for heavy algorithmic work or anything like that either

I suppose if Shopify / Github have heavy algorithmic work they do do it in Ruby. I think you have a somewhat different understanding than I do on what software devs do most days. And it doesn't matter if it's php/ruby or java/c++, so many of us, I believe, just glue pieces of business logic together. If you happen to have a problem that's purely algorithmic (let's say finding the shortest path on some map), the first thing most devs I know would do is look for an open source solution for that (and if one doesn't exist in Ruby, you can always wrap it in a Ruby API). That's what I know about most of software engineering, you have a different take (now of course there are different fields like embedded etc which I'm not referring to, I speak only of high level business logic coding).