Hi!
I am writing to ask for your advice.
Currently we have several software developers with 7+ years in PHP that
have strong desire to switch to Ruby on Rails.
They have passed a brainbench certification in Ruby on Rails with
excellent results, but have only several months of experience in Ruby.
Are there any possibilities to find Ruby project for them? What they
should do to persuade a client that they will be good at Ruby?
Could free piloting project may be a solution?
Are there any other things they can do to prove their capability to
fulfill Ruby projects?
What do you think?
Thank you in advance!
There are people with limited programming experience who are struggling,
but
progressing with Ruby and Rails projects. It is one of the most
outstanding
achievements of Rails that this is even possible.
The bar for a Ruby/Rails programmer is not set so high, not when you
consider juniour positions. It all depends on the hiring company of
course,
but Ruby and Rails is not so difficult that positions are beyond several
months of retraining.
That said, certifications are generally considered worthless. The Ruby
community places great significance on:
- github projects and commits
- published ruby or rails projects
- open source contributions in general
So go building them apps.
When we were recruiting for a Rails position PHP (in fact any dynamic
language) was fine if it also came with experience, I would guess that
7 years PHP should mean some good experience. If the rest of your CV
panned out you would have got an interview. Certification would have
counted for nothing. The truth is that after 7 years as a PHP
developer you shouldn’t need to prove anything other than you
understand web development as a whole rather than just programming. If
anyone with 7 years programming experience is still s ‘PHP programmer’
rather than a ‘web developer’ or just a plain programmer then that
would be a bad thing.
So honestly there is little you can do but polish up your CV so that
you stress that you are a web developer (list your accomplishments and
skills you have developed - databases, web servers, memcached, xml,
javascript … the list just goes on) who just happens to have 7 years
of PHP under their belt. That 7 years should mean something, you are
no longer a code monkey, you have been programming longer than most
startups have existed (the first Twitter message was 2006, the company
was founded in 2008 - you have been a web developer longer than
Twitter has existed for).
Make sure that you don’t undervalue yourself, a programmer with that
much experience should take to a new language without breaking sweat.
Your knowledge of web development is your asset not your knowledge
about the dark corners of a specific programming language.