[cosmotic]

This would seem to indicate it is hard to find Rails devs, which itself might indicate devs don't like Ruby/Rails. If devs liked it and the market was growing as fast as devs were learning or slower, then commissions would stagnate or go down. So either the number of open jobs is increasing, devs are leaving, it's harder to learn than the sales pitch indicates, or a combination.

[tomhallett]

I 100% agree with your first part, but offer a slightly different conclusion - Ruby on Rails heavily skews to small startups (for various reasons not worth getting into here). Startups also tend towards Senior engineers, because they don't have the bandwidth to train junior engineers. So those recruiters are often looking for "Senior Rails" engineers which is even harder to find.

If the above is correct, it presents an interesting question to junior engineers: is it worth it to learn Ruby on Rails as a junior engineer? While there are advantages to learning Rails (it's heavily opinionated, what you learn maps very well to what professional projects look like), there is more job supply in the "python + LeetCode" path (how that relates to competition - who knows).

[kenhwang]

My personal experience (myself and my social group) suggests there's serious brain drain.

All my peers who started their careers with Rails that know it like the back of their hands have zero desire to ever work with it again professionally. They're all exceptional engineers who had no problems picking up/migrating to Scala/Rust without productivity loss.

On the other side, I see all the upcoming engineers that missed the initial Rails popularity wave. To them, Rails is often times much more frustrating than TS/Python offerings. There's very little freely available quality onboarding materials, getting the environment set up is incredibly frustrating with how fickle bundler has become, and deployments are still complicated.

My take is Rails is good for those who already know Rails, since the stability of it lets seasoned Rails developers carry forward all their experience. But for someone without that history, TS/Python frameworks offer a much faster/smoother onboarding process, especially with the massive familiarity advantage devs already have with Python/JS from schooling/web.

If you're going to go out of the way to learn a new language, why would you learn one that occupies the same space as one you already know?

[ericb]

Or that the fast growing startups using it are large-scale now and hoovering up available talent. Github, shopify, airbnb, gitlab, coinbase, hulu, twitch, etc.