Job offers/positions and searching for Ruby developers

Rails
1

I wanted to ask the more senior members of the group whether job
postings and the like are frowned-upon here. It’s just a little
difficult to find Ruby programmers in a general job searching.

Alternatively, if anyone knows of some good sites to hire full-time on-
site RoR developers, I would appreciate any advice. Difficulty: small
company, don’t want to pay to trawl CareerBuilder and other such sites.

2

On 27 May 2008, at 18:21, Clever N. wrote:

I wanted to ask the more senior members of the group whether job
postings and the like are frowned-upon here. It’s just a little
difficult to find Ruby programmers in a general job searching.

As far as I’m concerned, go ahead ! (within reason obviously; a
recruitment agency posting the same message everyday would be over the
top).
No idea how good it is for that, but workingwithrails allows users to
flag themselves as ‘available for hire’

Fred

3

http://railspays.com/ (UK)
http://jobs.37signals.com/

that’s where I subscribe for job announcements.

4

Clever N. wrote:

I wanted to ask the more senior members of the group whether job
postings and the like are frowned-upon here. It’s just a little
difficult to find Ruby programmers in a general job searching.

Alternatively, if anyone knows of some good sites to hire full-time on-
site RoR developers, I would appreciate any advice. Difficulty: small
company, don’t want to pay to trawl CareerBuilder and other such sites.

While there are certainly more of us than there were a couple of years
ago, I think the numbers of Rails developers is still quite small
compared to something like .Net or Flash or the like. I think that
relative “scarcity” coupled with your belief that they need to be
on-site is the root of your difficulty.

Here’s to hoping that more and more hiring managers come to realize that
programmers are typically not very good looking human beings; why do you
want to look at them? To require them to show up in your building, in
your city, is not good for them, and not good for you, and not good for
the pretty people you have sitting around doing marketing and being
receptionists, etc. :slight_smile:

Physical togetherness does not promote better software. Not long ago I
was part of a rag-tag group of developers operating well as a team
despite locations in four different time zones around the planet.

Please do yourself a favor and look into building a geographically
dispersed but technologically connected group of development talent.
We’re out here, and we’re easy to find, if you’re not limiting your
search to one city.

cheers,
jp

5

Jeff P. wrote:

programmers are typically not very good looking human beings; why do you
want to look at them?

Darn, I thought one of the pros of Ruby was better looking programmers.

http://flickr.com/photos/46457493@N00/230535210/

Tor Erik

6

On May 27, 8:15 pm, Jeff P. [email protected]
wrote:

While there are certainly more of us than there were a couple of years
ago, I think the numbers of Rails developers is still quite small
compared to something like .Net or Flash or the like. I think that
relative “scarcity” coupled with your belief that they need to be
on-site is the root of your difficulty.

It is not a belief in the ideological sense, it is a necessity of our
development model and our financial means, and the CEO’s wishes.

Here’s to hoping that more and more hiring managers come to realize that
programmers are typically not very good looking human beings; why do you
want to look at them?

Accountability, personal relationships, and easier flow of ideas.

Physical togetherness does not promote better software. Not long ago I
was part of a rag-tag group of developers operating well as a team
despite locations in four different time zones around the planet.

Not necessarily. However, pair programming, on-the-spot code reviews,
and other programming practices I engage in pretty much necessitate
it. Plus, it’s much easier if you are an actual programmer with no
management above you to handle a single person in real-time than
spending 90% of your time reviewing other’s work and simply acting as
bookkeeper and specification clarifier (which is what I turned into,
except for a critical part of the code no one outside the company was
allowed to touch). I worked with a 10-person Ukrainian team before,
and the code was OK, but at the end of it, we became dependent on them
because we had no in-house programmers, and bad things ensued.

Please do yourself a favor and look into building a geographically
dispersed but technologically connected group of development talent.
We’re out here, and we’re easy to find, if you’re not limiting your
search to one city.

I have nothing against what you are saying. But when you don’t have
any venture capital (i.e. the company has to gasp actually earn what
it pays out every month), it’s tough to spend twice the money on a
contract basis than for an in-house person.

7

Clever N. wrote:
…

I have nothing against what you are saying. But when you don’t have
any venture capital (i.e. the company has to gasp actually earn what
it pays out every month), it’s tough to spend twice the money on a
contract basis than for an in-house person.

Ok, fair enough. Sounds like larger projects than I typically work on
for one thing.

Accountability, personal relationships, and easier flow of ideas.
No sale on this, I’m afraid. It simply isn’t so.

Accountability: If you have to watch them that close they aren’t worth
hiring in the first place. No amount of watching will make a weenie
work hard. At best you can get them to fake it and blow smoke up your
backside.

Relationships: Ten emails a day and an occasional phone call are all
that’s needed for this.

Easier flow of ideas: see above.

Anyway, I respect your decision to keep it in house, I just hope it gets
more common for people with medium to small developments to go the
telecommute route. If ever there were a time and a technology and an
endeavor where it makes sense, this is it.

cheers,
jp