[eviluncle]

what kind of codebases were you working on? I've had the pleasure of working on 2 big companies using rails, each with well over 50 engineers and the code base was so relatively easy to jump into. The beauty of rails is that if you follow its guidelines, anybody can jump right in.

what alternatives do you find are better when scaling up with more engineers?

[stouset]

The biggest issue I’ve seen is when companies hire 4 junior engineers with zero or minimal Rails experience to bootstrap their product, let them loose, and… yeah everything quickly becomes a mess.

Nobody understands the conventions so they cargo cult whatever they found from a blog that was last updated in 2013. Or they find novel and extraordinary solutions to problems that the framework literally already solved. Or they have zero experience modeling things in a database—much less doing it the way ActiveRecord encourages—so every battle is always uphill.

The biggest problem with convention over configuration is when you have a team where nobody understands the conventions. But what else do you expect?

[seti0Cha]

I don't believe I've ever seen 4 junior engineers who don't know what they're doing build anything other than a mess. I don't have any experience with rails, so I can't say whether the mess would be worse, but those engineers are definitely going to make one without guidance.

[stouset]

My point precisely :)

I will happily concede, though, that I do think in that sort of situation that Rails can very easily become worse than other languages/frameworks.