[Nextgrid]

> even if it's easier to build something, being so hard to find affordable developers offsets every advantage you had.

I think that's debatable. All these new & hyped up languages may give you cheaper developers, but you won't get the ecosystem and functionality Rails provides out of the box.

JS and derivatives (TypeScript, etc) is very popular nowadays and yet on the backend something that's provided out of the box with a monolithic framework like Rails (or Django, or Laravel) will take time to implement manually (often in a bad way).

In the end, you may "save" on salaries by going with another language, but then you'll end up spending twice as much time delivering functionality which would completely offset any savings.

[mohanmcgeek]

As someone who has worked in both rails and JavaScript ecosystems, this is untrue.

Running on rails not only increases Dev expense but also the operational expense since you would need more servers to handle a similar load. (Correct me if this has changed with Ruby 3)

[bestinterest]

Not sure I agree on the operational aspect in the large scheme of things. Servers are cheap, people are expensive.

Thinking out loud here, say you can only serve 200rqs with Rails but 2000rqs in some other framework (yes not fair comparison, endpoints matter etc etc). That means you need 10x the servers but take a step back a sec. 200rqs is 720k a hour or 17,280,00 a day or 518,400,000 requests a month. (The scale for that is pretty high already). I'm pretty sure the 10x increase you need in servers will cost less than 1 extra employee at say $70k a year.

[mohanmcgeek]

This has always been the argument of people optimising for development speed. Fair argument when you're actually getting dev speed in return. But it's mostly consulting companies making this argument, who don't have any skin in the game for ops cost.

If this were true, startups wouldn't be paying a third of the money they raised to AWS.. considerably more than people cost.

Companies grow and this 1/10th efficiency will quickly multiply.

[joelbluminator]

If ops cost are so important why are we all developing micro services now? That's 50 containers instead of one big one, extremely inefficient. Today I learned our 15 devs development environments cost as much as the whole production setup (!) because we each get a whole kubernetes cluster with all the containers. That's quite bonkers. So do we care about ops cost or do we not? I think we don't really.

[Nextgrid]

> startups wouldn't be paying a third of the money they raised to AWS

They're paying that because they and their investors want to. If you look beyond that it's absolutely possible to get that infrastructure at a tenth of the AWS cost by going with old-school bare-metal providers such as OVH or Hetzner, but then it means you no longer get to brag about how you wrangle (self-inflicted) complexity with Terraform and tons of YAML files at the next AWS conference.