Is it worth learning Ruby on Rails in 2021?

hey everybody i'm back with another video in today's topic i'm going to be talking about ruby on rails job market and whether or not ruby on rails is still a good platform to learn in 2021 going into 2022 so as you know i'm a professional ruby on rails developer i've been doing this since 2012 and the market for ruby on rails and the tech market in general in web applications and web development it's changed a lot over the years and whenever you're using a cutting edge technology like ruby on rails you have to reassess where you're at and constantly worry whether the platform you're using is still the latest and greatest or whether it's a good opportunity or a good time to start learning something else that might be better so that's what i'm going to be talking about today so the job market and opportunities for rails developers is just like any other market it's driven by supply and demand and let's start off by talking about the demand side of things here's the good news it's that ruby on rails is still a platform of choice for companies that are developing new products and startup companies and even some well-established companies so i frequently get emails and calls from recruitment agencies and they tell me that they're looking for rails developers and whatever they call it's sometimes a good opportunity to talk to them and see what their what their clients are like in the market and ask them you know what is the latest technology what's the in demand skill right now is ruby on rails still on top of things and the good news is that i've gotten a few calls like that in the last several weeks and i've asked that question and so far the feedback that i've gotten is positive rails is still very much in demand a lot of small companies that are very well funded with startup capital are choosing to build out their products using ruby on rails and then you've also got intermediate com intermediate-sized companies and also a few well-established players like shopify airbnb and etsy and many others that that are big players in the tech industry who have their entire platform built on ruby on rails and they're probably not going to be abandoning that platform anytime soon because it's a core part of their product and that's very hard to change there's no really real reason for them to migrate they're fully invested in ruby on rails and the platform success but overall ruby on rails is generally going to be used by younger companies companies that have been started within the last 10 years or so and that can be a really good thing because there's more opportunity at a younger company and a lot of these companies they're well funded they have startup capital from investors and that's good for you too as a developer because if the uh if you're going to be building their core product on this platform they're going to invest in you and these uh the funding it comes in big waves so a lot of these companies they have very flexible budgets where they can they have the deep pockets that allow them to offer their developers a pretty good salary and benefits so that's a really good advantage but that's a general thing going on right now in the tech industry as well but ruby on rails is part of that oh by the way today i'm drinking just a classical fashion it's a shot of bourbon some bitters a little cherry in it and sometimes i like to put a little bit of maple syrup in it but now here's where the outlook gets a little bit dimmer so according to some of the surveys that track the popularity of various programming languages ruby on rails has taken a little bit of a dip in popularity over the last several years so according to the stack overflow survey from 2016 or 2015 it's dropped in popularity from their number 11th place ranking to the number 17th place ranking and a little bit more concerning is that of the percentage of respondents saying that they use ruby on rails a lot in their projects that figure dropped a little bit over a percent from or actually close to two percent from around the mid eight percent to around six uh in the 21 2021 survey it was 6.75 percent so so of this whole survey of developers uh the percentage the the piece of the pie of ruby has shrunk a little bit and there's another organization uh that has a publication ieee spectrum that also publishes a ranking and that shows similar results ruby on rails in 2015 held the ninth place but in 2020 it was ranked number 16. and along with that their popularity metric which was 76.2 back in 2015 it dropped down to 63.6 so it does seem that ruby on rails has lost a little bit of steam in the uh in the market as far as its popularity but it's still very much present and keep in mind that this doesn't necessarily mean an overall drop in market share because we don't know exactly how big the pie is so in that time frame the tech industry has grown there's been new technologies introduced engineers are probably using more of a variety of technology so it could be that you have more engineers in general working on things and maybe the overall market for ruby on rails talent is still about what it was several years ago it's just a smaller piece of the pie because the tech market in general has grown and there could be a bigger um a bigger mix of technologies being used but that's just my speculation of um of what it could mean a little caveat so that you don't read too much into it and think ruby on rails is in a decline just because it fell in those rankings a little bit so now let's take a look at the supply side of ruby talent so from the recruiters i've spoken with and from what i see in my own personal network ruby developers seem to be very difficult to get right now and if you have a few years of experience this is definitely going to play to your advantage it'll give you more opportunities more places you could work you'll probably get hired faster and you could probably negotiate better better benefits and salary right now if you have several years of experience doing ruby on rails developer and you're good at what you do you could easily make a six-figure salary now i think something that's made the supply of ruby on rails developers really tight in the last several years is that there's been a shutdown of several coding boot camps so that's kind of constrained the supply of new developers coming into the market many of these boot camps that have gone out of business they they taught ruby on rails as a default as as a first language to learn for new recruits so you don't have as much of that pipeline of new entrants into the talent pool and also the existing boot camps that remain open and are still training people because react has become so prevalent over the last few years and also you have the rise of the node.js backend along with express server some of the boot camps have shifted their focus uh to teaching more javascript oriented education and and not as much ruby on rails whereas ruby on rails used to be kind of more of a centerpiece of the education you would get at these boot camps so that also limits the supply of new developers coming into the market which is really good if you have experience because uh you have less competition but now the catch is if you are a rails developer or you want to be a rails developer you have to have that experience to be valued in the market a lot of companies are kind of hesitant to take a chance on somebody that just learned or is learning ruby on rails and part of that is because they're a little bit worried about the level of commitment that you might have as a new developer to that uh there's ways around that and it's kind of a chicken or the egg problem when it comes to experience but maybe that's a better topic for another video so should you learn ruby on rails in 2021 is it a good language to learn well i don't think there's a very good clear-cut definitive yes or no answer to that because you're making an investment in the language and it boils down to what you want to do with it and how you're going to use it so here are a few things that you should probably factor into your decision about what language that you want to learn first think about what you already know and how ruby on rails might fit in to your larger strategy and your larger knowledge is it a complementary skill set for you to add so for example if you're a react developer it might be useful to start learning ruby on rails now because it will diversify your skill set a little bit and you'll also be able to do that back end sort of stuff and ruben rose still may be a pretty good choice as a first programming language learner because it's very easy it has a syntax that's easy to read and if the hotwire framework works out as well as dhh seems to intend for it to work out you could be very productive as a as a rails developer writing both the back end and a very dynamic front end with sprinklings of javascript using that framework so a second thing to consider is what you want to branch into by learning ruby on rails or or what what exactly is it that you'd like to apply it to so ruby on rails is an excellent tool for doing back end web application development by back end i mean the part that takes web requests on the server side and then it interfaces the data or does whatever processing is necessary at the business end of things in fact a lot of ruby on rails applications written today are api only meaning that they're not using any of the rails tools for rendering templates and delivering the html they're just taking the web requests and processing them as an api through uh making accessible restful apn point api endpoints or a graphql endpoint through which the data is transferred and then in the client side in the web browser that is all run by javascript using a framework like react vue or angular that's a very common setup that you see with ruby on rails now i think very few large companies actually use ruby on rails from the standpoint of a template rendering engine or or along with jquery most of those interfaces now are being transitioned to the full front-end stacks that are built on a complete javascript framework so ruby on rails while it makes a great backend tool i think one of the reasons that it's kind of a niche language to learn is because some of its competitors uh have other uses for example python if you if you know python the the web development aspect of it the django framework is only just a small slice of what you could do with python python's also used in artificial intelligence that there's a tool called tensorflow that is uh very prominent in ai and machine learning and python is used a lot in data science and it's used as a scripting tool because of its popularity in data science it's used as a scripting tool by people who aren't full-time programmers but they want to get certain programmatic things done in the computer so you have like a lot of non-programming professionals using python as well people who might be more of business intelligence analysts and i think that's the reason why it's such a popular language is because it's not everybody is using it to develop full applications python is very much being used in kind of sprinklings and complementary aspects to other business functions and and it's kind of an easy language to learn get into for people that are coming in from sort of a more business background and then the advantage with uh javascript and specializing in javascript is that people who do front end they're familiar with the javascript syntax and they want to take that same skill and knowledge and apply it to building a back-end system uh and that's where you have the the node.js along with express server right in the back end and some companies and some developers see a synergy to this but there's a and it kind of makes sense but there's a little bit of a catch in that uh doing back end itself is such an immersive topic that you probably most likely will end up specializing in even if you're using javascript you most likely will be specializing in uh the back end part of the system or the front end part of the system and when you kind of get immersed in a a particular set of tools in that way uh different components of the system could change there could be changes to react there could be changes to front end world with with what's popular there you know may be react one year maybe it review the next year and the framework itself has its own complexity to learning there there's its own learning curve and i kind of talked about this a little bit in my last video how there aren't enough hours in the day to master everything so it's very likely that even if you're a javascript developer and you're working at a company you're probably going to specialize or spend most of your time doing either front end or back end and it's gonna it might be difficult for you to just kind of switch between the two seamlessly without having to do a little bit of learning so if you consider that to be a little bit of a barrier and and i think that's why rails still rail still has traction uh is because when people are specializing like that you know if rails is more efficient and you feel it's a better tool than using node and express as your back end then why not use ruby on rails and have your engineer specializing ruby on rails focus on that and and they could be more productive but it comes down to opinion so a third thing to consider uh when you're trying to learn ruby on rails and this kind of touches on the last one is what type of project do you want to do like i said ruby on rails is a web development system if you want to write windows applications in it it's probably not the best tool of choice you probably want to learn c sharp for that or something like like that um and then the uh the fourth thing that i have on my list to consider whether you want to learn ruby on rails is what type of environment do you want to work in and what type of co-workers do you want to have what sort of team do you want to have so the reason that i don't really cover net or java on this channel and i have very little interest in those platforms is because those are used in very frequently in large corporation type of environments and whereas like the open source tool like rails or even python and for certain javascript they're more popular among smaller companies that are building technology oriented products you know done through doing business through the internet and because they're younger technologies you're probably going to be you're probably going to be working for a uh a smaller younger company that's going to have more opportunity for you and along with that you're going to be sharing your work with people who have the same type of interest and enthusiasm for that type of environment and and that's kind of where my interests are and that's kind of why i focus on on ruby on rails and maybe on this channel i'll also i'm gradually trying to do more javascript type of work because you can't avoid it javascript uh is on the front end which is very prevalent and and um yeah i'm just going to be covering more javascript as i make more videos for this channel and maybe eventually i'll do some python too if i have time for that but anyway if you want to join me on my adventure of making videos talking about technology topics and also making tutorials i like to do a lot of tutorials on more advanced programming uh doing advanced topics in ruby on rails and hopefully javascript 2 very soon then subscribe to my channel and hit the like button on this video if you thought it was useful for you too by the way i'd like to know what your opinion is on this video is ruby on rails still relevant today what technology stack do you use and do you think offers the most promise as a back-end web development tool and what do you like to focus your time on learning write in the comments down below so i'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Winston Kotzan

Views: 1,351

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Id: qpL-1-VLBzQ

Length: 20min 43sec (1243 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021