> FWIW, I had a call with a recruiter a couple days ago who claimed that the most expensive candidates to find at the moment are Rails people.

Maybe in USA. In Europe, Rails has been far less popular. Now I imagine expensive candidates means the ability to work on decade old Rails codebases from previous versions, which means with a lot of Rails experience.

Specifically asked about this. Mixture of old codebases and new.

Half the companies using it are 1-2 years old according to him. Lots of 10 person startup teams just fresh off a raise.

I've noticed that as well, that senior Ruby/Rails people will become very valuable in the coming years, which is good to hear. However, 10+ years into the future is the real scary part. Will jobs dry up so much so (especially due to the accelerating pace of tech turnover) that Ruby/Rails will essentially become the FORTRAN of the times? Who knows.

Not so long ago, before the rise of Node.js and when it seemed like Rails was The Way of the Future (tm) and everyone was really down on PHP, I used to joke that there was a silver lining to PHP becoming the next COBOL: there weren't many COBOL jobs around, but there also weren't many COBOL programmers around, and if you needed a COBOL programmer the chances were that you really needed a COBOL programmer.

As things have played out, PHP has done pretty well at modernizing (I know some would debate that, but that's a different thread), and Rails has faded a bit into the background -- although now I joke that because Rails is well out of its fad phase, it can get down to the real work.

I do wonder whether Rails has been kind of a mixed blessing for Ruby all in all, though. I think Ruby is, in itself, a great alternative to Python or Perl, and it's the language I reach for first when I'm writing short utility scripts -- but since Rails exploded in popularity before Ruby itself did, a lot of Ruby programmers really only know Ruby to the degree they know Rails.

> a lot of Ruby programmers really only know Ruby to the degree they know Rails

This so bad that frequently I see “Ruby on Rails” in lists of programming languages aside “PHP”, or “Elixir”, or “JavaScript”.

(When I was most in to Ruby – but not so much Rails, even then – there was actually a palpable divide in the community between the Rails-only community and the broader Ruby community, some of which was Rails-inclusive.)

Granted, I have never used it a lot except for hacky projects, but I have never used any Ruby except in the context of Rails. Is it really used for anything else?

Yeah Rails is definitely a blessing and a curse. I only know of Chef and Puppet being kinda big, but both of those are waning in popularity.

Unlikely. To this day Rails is still being chosen for new projects. I see it for example in HackerNews job postings. You can see the company's tech and year of founding so you know it is new startups. Sure, its not close to how popular it used to be, but definitely not dying. And then what about all the existing code? There is a lot. I think Rails has its place and is still good at what it does, a segment of the population will continue loving working with it.

Do companies care about about tech turnover?

I have friends everywhere from FAANGMULA to Deloitte to 100 person tech startups (and I am at one myself)to banks. We have a group chat of classmates.

No attempts to stem the wave of resignations anywhere as far as we can tell.