We have a shortage of good developer talent, period. Whether it's only because we're in a startup bubble is anyone's guess. But in troubling fashion, some CTO-level people (such as the author of the linked blog post) claim that their difficulty in finding qualified Rails talent is driving them back to other less-desirable technologies such as PHP and .NET.

Do we think that people switching their projects away from Rails is a troubling trend? Will that trend cause the decline of Rails overall?

And If this is really a problem, then what can we do as a community to try to help it?

I've taken on two apprentices myself. One works full time for me as a junior developer and the other works with us in the evenings after spending the day at his full-time, non-developer job. Apprenticeships help in terms of bringing new inexperienced talent into the community, but they don't help alleviate the pain of companies that can't find a single experience Rails person to lead their team.

One big red flag from the post for me is "in Atlanta." Yeah, I mean, if you _have_ to have local talent, and you don't live in the top five or six cities, it's going to be incredibly hard to find people. We see this in Pittsburgh, too, honestly.

Luckily, with Rails people caring so much about open source, we already have lots of natural experience working in distributed teams... it brings its own challenges, but I think is ultimately more useful.

The decline of Rails will occur when Rails 4 doesn't have a good answer for building Javascript heavy applications. We're at a crossroads: we can keep being awesome for startups, or we can be great for The Enterprise. I'm not a big fan of SPAs, but the reality is that people are building them, and I think Rails makes for a great back end. We just have a PR problem: confreaks.com

I'm obviously biased, but if you only want to hire experienced devs then you're saying "I want someone else to pay the price of building up their experience." That's not really fair or sustainable.

What is the ramp up time/cost for an experience web developer who hasn't programmed Ruby or Rails into a Rails job?

Depending on their familiarity with OO, testing, etc -- I think you're looking at 4-5 months. They can then be "solid" engineers, especially when guided by a more experienced senior dev / architect type or external consultant.

I agree with a lot of the commenters on the blog post, one of the problems is potential employers have a mismatch between their requirements and the position and renumeration. At the extreme end, we've all seen job listings for "senior engineer" that only David qualifies for, and I suspect it'd take bit more than an engineers salary to get him away from 37s. ;)

It's a market, if you only want the "uber 10 year rails experience!!!11!" candidates you are going to pay out the nose for them.

As Jeff alludes to, somebody actually has to train up these experienced Rails devs, and it's always "someone else." Few companies have taken the steps Living Social has with hungryacademy.com on this.

Hire remote, hire junior, hire general engineers and train them in Rails. Pay a premium for one senior dev and have him train the rest. Pay for a consultant, contractor, or firm to help train your new team. Email me at tim@cloudcitydevelopment.com if you're stuck and I'll help. ;)

People have been bemoaning the lack of good talent, as long as Rails has existed - it's still relatively new and demand has grown the entire time, so that's inevitable. It hasn't killed Rails off yet.

Things like devbootcamp.com cropping up are a sign of a missing spot in the ecosystem that we can all help fill.

I may be pivoting away from mainly taking projects looking for expensive talent in SF to taking on greenfields and MVPs that I can do with junior engineers, under supervision.

Tim, I really like the idea of taking on greenfield and MVP projects with junior engineers under your supervision. How would you structure the business end of that arrangement? Meaning, how do you charge for the time of the junior developers versus your time?

The Atlanta metro area is one of the top population centers of the country and has a huge IT market. Granted, it doesn't have quite the startup culture of the valley or NYC, but the Rails scene is solid here with a good 50 to 70 people attending the meetups. As for my friends at SearchDiscovery, I know the executive team and I know that they're willing to pay above market for the right person. It seems strange to me that they can't even find applicants.

I don't mean to talk shit on Atlanta; what I mean is that by constraining yourself to only people in your physical location, you're gonna run into problems in a competitive markets.