| It depends to whom you're asking this question. Some people have high standard than others. I wouldn't bet a consulting project performing integration of various systems using Ruby if the programmers on my team average of 2 years "side-project" Ruby/Rails. I still wouldn't bet on Ruby developers with 2 years of experience on certain type of web-apps either unless I've seen their code, code style, discipline, judgement, etc. I would trust a Ruby developer who got burned by some of the Ruby tricks though. Case and point (or anecdotes): I recently brought in a veteran Java, 2 year-ish Ruby/Rails, and 1 year-ish JS (thanks to Node.js and Crockford "The Good Parts") programmer to help us working on some of the JavaScript codebase. Java knowledge is intermediate despite the number of years(I consider deep JVM and standard JDK knowledge around hard-to-use packages such as NIO, Thread, Networking as expert, other than that, just intermediate). Pragmatic guy. Understand OOP and its gotchas. I made an observation of her work in Ruby and JS. On the JS side, she wrote much more code than needed and my gut feeling tells me that she does this to increase her experience using JS. Kinda using it as a playground. On the Ruby side, certain bad OO practice tends to be a little bit more accepted by her. Where as she would be critical when it comes to bad OO practice in Java. Hence this is why I would prefer to observe developer's attitude more as oppose to the experience level. Because sometime 1-2 years are considered as "Honeymoon" period where everything looks fine and dandy. As soon as the honeymoon is over and your significant others start to show its true colour, then you're back down to the earth again. |