From: tamouse mailing lists <tamouse.lists@...>
Date: 2013-01-09T12:35:21+09:00
Subject: Re: Pure Ruby Jobs

On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 6:47 PM, Brandon Weaver <keystonelemur@gmail.com> wrote:
> One thing has been bugging me lately. I've been looking around for jobs in
> Ruby and I always find Rails within minutes, but pure Ruby or Raw Ruby are
> never really mentioned. I just find it odd that Rails completely dominates
> the Ruby market when quite frankly Ruby itself is an excellent language for
> administration on its own. I can understand it falling under "a scripting
> language" in most markets like Python or Perl, but given its strengths why
> doesn't it stand more on its own outside of large scale DSLs?

I think it's basically that Rails is the 800-pound gorilla in the Ruby
world, i.e., it's Ruby's killer app. Also, more people are willing to
hire out for Rails developers, because they know they need a web site,
but they aren't developers. Taking out the whole web site arena, Ruby
does enjoy some traction, but generally speaking it's people writing
their  own stuff in Ruby.

Searching specifically for Ruby jobs that aren't Rails is going to be
tough, as you've found. Not that they don't exist, they're just the
needles in a whole lot of awfully big haystacks.

If you don't want to write Rails apps, a fair enough thing, then I
suggest stop looking for shops that do NOT mention specific languages;
you're likely to get more traction by looking for places that want
software development support in general. One place I did a fair bit of
this was writing the analytics software for a research team (pre-ruby,
but still pretty awesome). They did not care what I wrote in, as long
as it gave the correct answers and ran in the space and time provided.
Just an example of something.