I'm about to pivot my life from using my marketing degree to devoting myself to becoming a Rails developer. My wonderful and analytical wife wants to see some hard data on the number of open junior Rails dev positions vs the number of applicants, or anything of that sort. She's too careful to believe my "everyone says we're in the middle of a Great Dev Drought" protestations.
Please help me find the right data. And if you have some anecdotal evidence, we'll consider that too!
Thanks a ton!
@brainscraps
EDIT: Since there is a consensus that having an active GitHub profile is a good thing, no matter how messy, here's a link: https://github.com/BrainScraps
* The Good News: I started coding 18 months ago, and now I'm a lead developer at a funded startup and a two-time contributor to Rails (along with other contributions to open source).
* The Bad News: While there is a hiring drought, there is NOT a drought for hiring guys who just learned Rails three-to-six-months ago at a dev bootcamp somewhere. We get literally dozens of cold emails a week from people like this. The amount they can contribute is almost nothing and 95% aren't capable of holding down a FT junior position.
I think my point is don't think that you'll go to some bootcamp at have a job for 90k with benefits in 6 months. You need to work your ass off to be employable in that amount of time, although it's possible.
I started coding 18 months ago, and now I'm a lead developer at a funded startup and a two-time contributor to Rails
Put some good Ruby code on github. If you can, you'll improve your chances of getting hired quite a bit. If you can't then you're not ready to be hired yet.
I'm actually making a part of my transition plan to attend an intensive course like those offered by General Assembly and CodeFellows.org
Those programs are designed to give me plenty of opportunity to put up live projects and public code. I have some stuff now, but it's so messy and noob-tastic that I'm not showing it to anybody for fear of being put in the stocks. It's that bad. :/
First, working apps are big: put them on Heroku, link them up. I don't care how "straightforward" or "noob" they may seem, I want to know you're capable of shipping working products. If you can only get me 90% of the way to a solution, having to solve the last 10% for you on a regular basis makes you far less valuable to my team. Blog about the challenges or one interesting aspect of each of these projects: even 3 paragraphs can show me you know how to communicate technical things.
Second, GitHub all the things. Show that you know the "full stack": front-end markup, data modeling, a bit of jQuery can't hurt. HAML/SCSS are all the rage, not too difficult to pick up, and show you're "hip."
Third, go to Rails meetups: in Austin, we have a hacknight every Tuesday, and a monthly Rails meetup. If I've worked on a problem with you over a beer, your resume will naturally gravitate to the top when I have an opening.
All of those things are doable over weekends and evenings, and running with just these three tasks for 6 weeks would put you, in my experience, a hundred miles ahead of everybody else looking for a junior position.
Good luck man.
More published code is better than less published code irrespective of quality, because it tells me that you're engaged and devoted to your craft, and it gives me a sense of what projects and technologies you're interested in and have been exposed to. Additionally, publishing code gives me a way to see your progression through the craft, and to get a sense of not only how developed you are as a programmer, but how you're growing.
A junior programmer who shows growth and improvement is a much better hire than a junior who is competent but shows no growth. When I hire people, I want to hire people who will grow into strong senior developers over their career, which means that I'm primarily looking for ability to learn and grow rather than a specific buzzword checklist. Hiring a junior comes with the expectation that I'm going to have to train and hand-hold them, but I want to hire a junior who will progress out of that stage, and will be able to start taking care of those things for new hires down the road.
Publishing code on Github doesn't mean that you're asking other people to use it; it just means you're publishing it. A Github profile on a resume is a +1 for me; a Github account with a lot of forks is another +1, an account with original code is yet another +1, and an account with original code that other people use is the big cherry on top. In all cases, though, I'd rather see an active account filled with "noobish" or "messy" code than an empty account.
You can enter your area etc for a more detailed range etc: https://angel.co/salaries
I've shown her some raw data from Indeed and DICE, but the reason why I've turned to the community is this:
She's not impressed with the raw number of open positions. If that were a conclusive indicator, then getting a marketing job would be a snap in the Bay Area, but I assure you that it is not. I tried explaining to her that price (or salary) is a good indicator of the saturation rate of the market, but she's not convinced by that argument. (I'm not sure that I am either. It could be that the salary averages are being driven up by more senior ruby positions that I wouldn't be able to qualify for in less than a few years.)
That's why I'm hoping to get some data points from employers who know whether or not there is actually a dev shortage like many people claim.
There is definitely a shortage of good talent across the majority of languages as a good developer is in demand. However, you have to prove to potential employers that you're a good developer which is why they usually as to see Github profiles etc in the application (and if you haven't got one already you should definitely make a Github account). Likewise, since you're learning you could even blog about learning Ruby on Rails and even create some mini-working products on Heroku to show that you're capable of shipping & able to communicate in technical terms.
Furthermore, for further evidence of employers trying to attract Ruby on Rails talent then, you should have a look what LivingSocial are doing to attract Ruby on Rails devs with http://www.hungryacademy.com
[1] http://www.wantedanalytics.com/press/2013/01/08/innovation-i...
Our entire pool is filled with software engineers and web developers that look very qualified on paper. However, it's hard to find someone with a good mix of (1) theoretical computer science knowledge, (2) practical programming experience, (3) problem solving skills, and (4) the drive to be truly great.
I have one piece of advice: If you are simply looking to "pivot" into programming for a job and because it's the hot thing to do, then don't! But if anything programming and computers is truly your passion; if it excites you so much that you have trouble sleeping; if you couldn't imagine your life doing anything else, then go for it by all mens. The odds are stacked against you, but you can beat them if you work hard. Good luck!
The kind of person that knows already that she loves programming probably already has a job as a programmer.
What are some things that you find disqualify candidates when you interview them?
Or conversely, what makes candidates look especially good when you're narrowing it down?
But you give no indication that you enjoy programming. As someone who has made significant career changes myself, I caution you that choosing a profession solely to follow demand, and not based on your true interests, can turn out badly.
I do enjoy programming! I've been working with HTML/CSS/jQuery for a couple of years and PHP/mySQL for about a year on and off and I absolutely enjoy the feeling of accomplishment when everything clicks and you get that one little line of output in the console that you've been driving at for 3 days.
I enjoy it enough to build things at hackathons just to see if I can. And sometimes I win and get interviewed on TechCrunch. Okay, so maybe that just happened one time.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/12/meet-the-vetsintech-hackath...
Also, Rails is so easy that you can slide by being junior.
Interesting nuance here. Maybe there are a lot of hacks out there who can Google their way through a Rails Tutorial, but cause more trouble than help when brought on to a production app?
Well that certainly isn't true.
EDIT: Quora has a lot of data about this. I am told that junior Rails developers in Boston can expect to make between 70-90k salary starting out. SF and NYC is higher.
