From: ptkwt@... (Phil Tomson) Date: 2004-09-29T09:39:20+09:00 Subject: Re: NYC Ruby job listing In article <4159F5BE.9010700@infofiend.com>, Ben Giddings wrote: >Francis Hwang wrote: >> Another interesting thing is that this is for a financial firm, not a >> web consulting firm. Finance companies aren't known for being >> risk-takers when it comes to technology: They tend to like >> technologies backed by big companies, and vendors with deep pockets. >> >> Just last week, at the monthly Ruby-NYC meeting, I was pointing out >> that in NYC we're a year or two behind the curve when it comes to tech >> and Ruby adoption, but hey, at least somebody's getting there. > >Interesting, but you'd think that if someone is serious enough to have a >job opening with Ruby as part of the title, someone on this list would >know them, especially considering they're asking for a "Senior" Ruby >developer. > >Anybody know who this is? > >I'd be interested to know if they have other Rubyists working there -- >I'd expect they would, wouldn't they? > I've run into rubyists out there who never posted to comp.lang.ruby or ruby-talk (in fact in one case, I don't think they had ever subscribed or read the list, so you couldn't even call them lurkers). There are a lot more lurkers than posters in general and there are a lot of folks who are not 'joiners' by nature. And there are people who have apparently just begun using Ruby in a business setting due to applications like Rails. Just as a 'sociological' case study consider The Robot Co-op in Seattle: ( http://robotcoop.com/ ) Ruby seems to be playing a large part in this start-up, but none of the names listed look familiar from ruby-talk or comp.lang.ruby. From the posts on their site it would seem that they first decided to use Rails which of course means they would be using Ruby. They mention that they're learning Ruby. Apparently they were unaware of the Seattle Ruby group. This raises two possibilities: 1) There are people out there using (or planning to use Ruby) who are unaware of the various Ruby resources (ruby-talk, local Ruby User's Groups) 2) Maybe Ruby is easy enough to learn that they have not had to check in to ruby-talk or a local Ruby User's Group and/or they prefer to remain 'under the radar'. Phil