I spent the majority of last year working on an Angular project, and I have 3+ years as a Rails dev.

One thing that's surprised me is I get nearly as much attention from recruiters for Angular work as for Rails. I think this is mostly due to the .NET world embracing it, they tend to be enterprisey gigs.

Give it a few years, and Angular 1.x is going to be like COBOL in the early 90s. Lotsa code out there to maintain...

And everyone loves enterprise maintenance gigs!

... if they pay handsomely.

Google's abandoning Angular 1.x, IMHO it's foolish to try to hang on to it.

I agree. My company also felt really burned when hearing Angular 2 is not backwards compatible. Probably going to be looking into React now.

Company where I currently work, feels pretty happy about using AngularJS 1.x. We aware of Angular 2 and very glad to see changes (especially Rendering Architecture). We know there will be migration path, but it's not so important - projects, which works good with 1.x, will remain on 1.x branch, and this branch will be supported long time enough. When Angular 2 will be released, we are going to try it in new apps. We are playing with ng2 in sandboxes like https://github.com/pkozlowski-opensource/ng2-play and changes are not as dramatic as most people thinks. Well, maybe forms and 2-way binding, but everything else just got more modern API mostly.

Why? React isn't a full framework and solves a completely different problem.

A lot of time was spent training people on angular. Angular being so big meant more training. I'm guessing our Tech Leads are more comfortable with React because it isn't a framework.

The main issue stemmed from research, development, and training costs from what I understand.

Hi s_baby, can you elaborate on some of the problems each is suited for? I've been considering diving into React for a few weeks now.

It's fairly simple to piece together a framework with React. I'm using React, Flux, React-Router and Superagent.

Yes, it isn't backwards compatible, but you can use AngularJS 2 side by side with Angular 1.X. There were migration paths presented at NG Japan.