Is Ruby On Rails Losing Steam?

itwbennett writes: In a post last week, Quartz ranked the most valuable programming skills, based on job listing data from Burning Glass and the Brookings Institution. Ruby on Rails came out on top, with an average salary of $109,460. And that may have been true in the first quarter of 2013 when the data was collected, but "before you run out and buy Ruby on Rails for Dummies, you might want to consider some other data which indicate that Rails (and Ruby) usage is not trending upwards," writes Phil Johnson. He looked at recent trends in the usage of Ruby (as a proxy for Rails usage) across MS Gooroo, the TIOBE index, the PYPL index, Redmonk's language rankings, and GitHut and found that "demand by U.S. employers for engineers with Rails skills has been on the decline, at least for the last year."

Comments

How about over 10 years?

[EMG at MU]

Sustained salary over a 10 year period would be a more interesting number to me.

Re:How about over 10 years?

[geekmux]

Sustained salary over a 10 year period would be a more interesting number to me.

We can cram the internet boom, a dot-com bubble, a dot-com crash, 9/11, the birth of DHS, and a rather massive banking failure that almost crashed the entire global economy inside a span of 10 years.

With factors like that going on all around your number, I'm not quite sure what value you can expect out of your salary stats. The only thing we've managed to sustain over the last 10 years is chaos. IT is hardly immune.

Re: How about over 10 years?

[__aaclcg7560]

Hand coding your own HTML pages is a lost art these days.

Everyone hates Ruby

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether or not you believe it was the world's most hipster programming language, they tried to sell it as a license to print money. And it is so clearly not. All the businesses with any real money either roll their own languages for in-house challenges, opt for something off the shelf and easy to recruit for, or have mountains of legacy code that merely needs to be maintained.

"Steam" is only half the salary equation

[hey!]

Specifically: the demand curve half of the equation. The other half is the supply curve. A platform can have *no steam whatsoever*, but so few programmers that the salaries are reasonably high.

Consider Delphi programming. I see Delphi positions come up once in a blue moon -- it's not used much any longer. But those salaries run from $80K to $110K plus. Sometimes you see a Delphi position come up in the mid 40s, but I suspect they're government positions.

I've seen listings for COBOL or PoweBuilder programmers both in the $60K to $110K plus range. You can bet when a company offers $110K for a PowerBuilder programmer it's because it's having a hard time finding one.