Hiring Ruby Developers for All Your Apps

Categorized as a language exclusively used to build for the web, the reality of Ruby is that it’s capable of doing so much more with the right teams and technologies around it. Hiring Ruby developers is a gateway to producing high-quality software with one of the industry’s most mature and reliable tools. Used to build mobile applications, desktop, and server-side software, Ruby is a language that can do far more than it routinely gets credit for.

Of course, Ruby on Rails is the framework that the language is most commonly used with and most often known for amongst developers. Rails is so highly popular for good reason too, it’s a fantastically productive web framework that underpins some of the web’s most widely-used sites and services from GitHub to Kickstarter, Twitch, and SoundCloud.

The combined effects of Ruby’s high productivity and popularity across multiple industries make it a valuable language for organizations to invest in. In practical terms, that investment means hiring Ruby developers, project managers, and test engineers for your organization. It means leaning on expertise and knowledge in the field to build the resources that will guide your engineering decisions long into the future.

Here, we’re able to lend you some of the knowledge and experience we’ve built up over time. With our practical experience and technical knowledge of Ruby development, we’ve prepared a series of resources, guides, and articles to kick off your journey into Ruby engineering.

Starting by guiding you through the features of the language, looking at the pros and cons it can offer for teams, and the technologies you can use to make it work inside your organization—we’ve put together everything you need to know about Ruby development today.

Deploying Ruby Teams

Despite the language itself being almost 30 years old, Ruby has been continually and progressively refined over that time to include as many modern architecture features and tools as any modern language that has emerged since. The maturity and depth of the language mean that it’s one with a lot of knowledge and experience for organizations and developers to catch up on.

An object-oriented language by design, it’s equally capable of being deployed for functional programming and server-side code as it is for web services and desktop applications. This flexibility is something that proves a distinct advantage to high-quality developers but a technical challenge for hiring managers and firms less familiar with its features.

It’s simply impossible to hire a Ruby developer without first understanding what they do. Luckily, you don’t have to be a Ruby veteran to understand what makes the language useful to organizations. Understanding how it stacks up in performance, development time, tooling, and available resources in comparison to other languages is enough to get you started on the right foot.

To help you get to grips with the advantages and drawbacks of Ruby, and provide the knowledge you need when it comes to hiring Ruby Developers, we’ve put together a guide that highlights all the relevant features of the language. Our guide to the pros and cons of Ruby development looks at the advantages and drawbacks you should consider when looking at how to deploy Ruby into your organization.

Understanding enough about the language to undertake hiring its specialized developers means being familiar with its most popular and widely used tools. Of course, Rails is now synonymous with Ruby development, but the language has a suite of other frameworks that are routinely used by engineers.

Looking at the details of a handful of the most productive and efficient frameworks available today, including Ruby on Rails, we’ve put together a guide that can help you choose between some of the best options available. Our article on the best Ruby frameworks to use today highlights the features and functionality that make each framework unique and outlines some reasons you may want to use them within your organization.

Hiring Ruby Developers

The way you hire Ruby developers will ultimately prove critical to how your teams work and build software together for many years to come. Get hiring right and other successes will inevitably follow. This means paying attention to not just the technical skills and abilities but the soft skills and interpersonal factors too.

Blending diverse personalities, engineering practices, and problem-solving skills come with significant pitfalls and challenges that need to be solved. Not every team of high-quality engineers will work well together.

How your teams are built will be critical to the kinds of future projects you can undertake. Do you bring in experienced freelancers to build towards identifiable goals and milestones, or deploy an outsourced team to manage a project from beginning to end?

Each choice has advantages and drawbacks that make them better suited to some types of projects over others. Choosing the right one is a case of managing preferences, budgets, and expectations within your organization.

We’ve put together a resource that looks at which option works best for each kind of project and attempts to weigh up why each is worthy of your consideration. Looking at the internal questions to ask before hiring and the pros and cons of each option, our article on should you hire Ruby freelancers or an outsourced Ruby development team? can help you decide how you’re going to build ruby knowledge and expertise within your business.

The Ruby Hiring Process

The next biggest stumbling block that many organizations face when it comes to recruiting technical talent is the practical challenges of finding available developers in today’s market. Hiring is rarely an easy challenge and when it comes to Ruby, the inherent capabilities and popularity of the language make the task even harder.

Finding and recruiting high-caliber Ruby developers into your organization means solving several difficult problems at once. Starting with finding developers in the first place—it’s up to you to advertise your firm as a place with interesting challenges, a high-quality development environment, and a culture in which developers will want to invest their time and talents in.

Next, is the challenge of sorting through the applications of candidates with diverse skill sets and wide-ranging experience and knowledge to create the team that you need.

Solving precisely these problems, we’ve put together a step-by-step guide that goes through each of these stages and suggests expert solutions for everyone. Our article on hiring Ruby on Rails developers can take you over some of the biggest hiring hurdles when it comes to deploying the Ruby language for the web using its most popular toolset.

With a shortlist of high-quality candidates, the next stage of hiring is to interview applicants to find out who fits into your team. While this is undoubtedly the most challenging part of recruitment, it’s also the part that provides the single greatest return on investment for the effort you put in.

Building your teams is about more than just hiring the best developers available. There are occasions when the very best in the field aren’t the right fit for your firm. This should mean keeping in mind the team you’re building with every hiring decision you make.

Finding out who you should hire from a field of highly-qualified and equally capable candidates is about putting together the personalities, skills, and expectations into a complete team package. Asking the right questions to get the right candidates is key to finding a common set of goals, abilities, and values that work together well.

Guiding you through this process, our guide on interviewing a Ruby developer suggests a handful of questions that can help you get a complete picture. Finding out about the culture and fit while leaning on your technical knowledge of Ruby, our guide on how to interview a Ruby developer and what to look for can build a team guaranteed to see success into the future.

Managing Ruby Developers

Having successfully hired a strong and cohesive team can feel like crossing the finishing line after a marathon effort. In truth, with the ideal team in place, you’re only just starting a new era of productivity and production.

Having accomplished one of your organization’s biggest and most challenging goals, the work then begins to put your team to work designing, building, and maintaining applications that will see a return on your investment. In this area, success requires strong technical management skills and careful avoidance of the pitfalls and traps that several organizations have fallen into in recent years.

Good management techniques are about building trust, relying on tools and methodologies, and leaning on experience to drive your team towards success. While this can seem like a daunting obstacle, it’s one easily overcome with a little advanced study.

To help, we’ve put together a guide to getting the most out of your Ruby teams. Looking carefully at the things you should do and the things you should avoid when it comes to hiring Ruby developers, our article on the do’s and don’ts of managing an outsourced Ruby development team can keep you on track for your team’s success.

The final stage of Ruby development is far from the most difficult, but it is the longest-lasting and most impactful to your long-term results. Maintaining your team’s progress and success in the future means keeping tabs on the latest technologies, methodologies, and thinking when it comes to Ruby.

At almost three decades old, Ruby has proven to be a language that can continuously evolve to stay relevant in the marketplace. For teams, this means a continually changing landscape of technologies to keep tabs on.

Taking a close look at what’s coming next when it comes to Ruby development, we’ve put together a resource that highlights what you should expect from the language in the years to come. Our article provides a glimpse into the future of Ruby development and outlines the changes to the technology and the shifts in thinking that are coming to Ruby in the near future.

Quality Ruby Development

While Ruby is still thought of today as a language for building for the web, experienced teams know it can do so much more. The key to reaching these abilities and unlocking the full potential of the language is in building a strong base of knowledge and experience when it comes to Ruby development.

Here, we’ve put together some key resources that can help you to build precisely those skills and experiences within your teams. From initial project considerations through to hiring, interviewing, and managing your development teams—our guides are an excellent starting point to building productive Ruby teams with the goals and ambitions of your organization in mind.

FAQs:

Q1. How do I hire Ruby developers?

There are multiple ways to hire Ruby developers for your organization. You can hire freelance Ruby engineers to come into your firm to build towards individual goals and tasks such as upgrading or maintaining a Ruby application. You might also hire an outsourced Ruby team to come in and build a complete project from the initial design phase right through to deployment and maintenance.

Every method you have to hire and deploy Ruby engineers within your firm comes with distinct advantages and drawbacks worthy of consideration. Freelancers, for example, are typically low-cost and more flexible than outsourced teams while outsourced teams are more rigid in their requirements and, in turn, come with more management expertise and guarantees on delivery. Both of these options are excellent ways of bringing Ruby developers into your organization whether building Ruby on Rails web apps or targeting one of the language’s many other technology strengths.

Q2. Are Ruby developers in demand?

Despite Ruby seeing less use in application development compared to other languages today, Ruby developers are still in high demand amongst companies. Ruby on Rails, in particular, is a high-demand skill set for developers due to its widespread use throughout web applications. Maintenance, upgrades, and additions to sites previously implemented in rails make up a significant amount of the demand for Ruby engineers today.

The median salary for a Ruby on Rails developer is higher than any other web framework at $77,000. At $15,000 higher than its next-nearest competitor, Svelte, Ruby on Rails is proving to command exceptionally high salaries as a result of this demand for the skill set.

The Ruby language alone commands a median salary of $80,000, placing the language joint fifth-highest, alongside Perl, among the most highly-paid languages today. Despite commanding a high salary for the skill set, the use of Ruby amongst developers today has fallen to below 10% in recent years, suggesting a decline in the future.

Q3. How much does a Ruby developer earn?

A U.S Ruby developer earns $80,000 per year according to Stack Overflow’s recent insights survey. Ruby on Rails, the language’s highly popular web framework, is the number one highest-paid web technology framework in current use.

Ruby’s median salary bracket puts it alongside Perl as the fifth highest-earning language. In comparison, Clojure takes the top spot, with median earnings of $95,000 while F# follows behind on $81,000. Each of these languages ranks considerably higher than more popular alternatives such as Python and C++, commanding salaries of $59,000 and $54,000 respectively.

These figures show a demand for developers with languages and skillsets outside of the most popular frameworks and tools that are in use and trending currently. Often, more unusual and less popular tools can command higher earning potential and a more demanding market than more current technologies.