Really? The Ruby ecosystem has been around a long time (Rails itself has been around for over 17 years!), so I'm surprised to hear there is any difficulty hiring highly experienced Ruby professionals.
It just isn't the language that people learn as their first language (via college or bootcamps). Plus it's not a gaming, data or machine learning language so it's not the kind of language that people come to from some other motivation. So I would say it hasn't had great organic growth for 5-7 years. That's practically a generation of programmers at this point.
I think all the big shops have most senior ruby devs locked up. If one has any meaningful rails and ruby experience under their belt they can stick their thumb out and land a job immediately.
If you look at all the job postings for Stripe, you'll notice that none of them require you to know ruby and expect you to be able to learn it on the job.
Right, which would indicate that they have more or less given up on appealing to ruby devs specifically. I work at a ruby only shop and we are the same way. I would say only about 30% of the candidates I interview have any ruby experience and of those, maybe 50% have recent experience.
We would prefer to hire talented ruby devs, but they just aren't there.
Yeah, duh, that's why we hire devs with any talent -- like I said. I'm not sure what you are pushing back against?
The contributions of a senior ruby engineer in a large, complex rails codebase will be immediate and will have a long tail over someone that has no experience in rails or ruby. This seems self-evident to me. It's just that there aren't enough of them.
I'm pushing back because I've had the opposite experience. I've started in a new team with exceptionally talented people, all of whom who have never written a line of ruby, all providing incredible contributions and hitting all our (pretty crazy) dates. All in a large highly complex ruby monolith.
It takes like 1 month to ramp on ruby, maybe even less. The cost of one month of ramp is highly justifiable given the fact that it's hard to find anyone who knows ruby (for real knows ruby) & most of the ramp is on system specifics anyways