[Question] Career advice

Highcontrast1

I'm currently living abroad and attending a short course in web development. I would like to be a full stack developer eventually, but for now am planning to specialise in front end, as I have a greater natural ability with design, ux etc.

I have been offered an internship doing ruby, leading to ruby on rails, but am not sure I should take it. I am planning to return to Ireland next year, and from what I can see on job sites, there aren't a huge amount of ruby jobs, so I don't see the point in learning ruby (I have never done ruby or ruby on rails before), especially because I have been learning node js, angular, mongo, mysql and express for about 8 months now. I feel like I would be unnecessarily starting from scratch, when ruby hasn't even got that many jobs going for it in Ireland.

Does anyone have any advice? Would the ruby experience be worthwhile (when I will probably be a primarily front-end developer for the next few years at least)?

Buford T Justice

Highcontrast1 wrote: »

I'm currently living abroad and attending a short course in web development. I would like to be a full stack developer eventually, but for now am planning to specialise in front end, as I have a greater natural ability with design, ux etc.

I have been offered an internship doing ruby, leading to ruby on rails, but am not sure I should take it. I am planning to return to Ireland next year, and from what I can see on job sites, there aren't a huge amount of ruby jobs, so I don't see the point in learning ruby (I have never done ruby or ruby on rails before), especially because I have been learning node js, angular, mongo, mysql and express for about 8 months now. I feel like I would be unnecessarily starting from scratch, when ruby hasn't even got that many jobs going for it in Ireland.

Does anyone have any advice? Would the ruby experience be worthwhile (when I will probably be a primarily front-end developer for the next few years at least)?

Real world experience with a company on real world projects is invaluable regardless of the language

Highcontrast1

Thanks for your response, I understand the benefit of real world of experience, but have two specific issues with that:

1) I want to do (and will get a job easier in, as I am better at) front end development. The experience I would receive at the internship would be in back end ruby work.

2) I want to take the fastest route to earning a wage, and can always in later years learn more languages etc. As i have already put a significant amount of time into learning javascript, node js and angular etc, will i not get a paying job sooner if I focus on perfecting what I already know, rather than starting from scratch with a whole other language? In particular because there seem to be more such jobs in Dublin than in ruby?

I fear that if I take the internship in six months time I will be still at a learning stage, whereas if i stick with what I know I will be employable shortly.

Graham

Highcontrast1 wrote: »

when I will probably be a primarily front-end developer for the next few years at least

What front-end experience have you got? Colleges are churning out basic html-wranglers by the boatload.

How many of these are you competent with; CSS, LESS, SASS, Bootstrap/Foundation, Javascript, Jquery, Angular, Ajax, version control, responsive web design, agile........

redman85

Highcontrast1 wrote: »

I fear that if I take the internship in six months time I will be still at a learning stage, whereas if i stick with what I know I will be employable shortly.

In fairness I think with programming everyone is always in the learning stage

I would do the internship, I'm going into my final year of college and have done internships the last two summers. I probably learned more in those
6 months then then I did in the first 2 years of college. Its also a great opportunity to build up your portfolio, build small projects at the weekends and if you get stuck you can ask the senior developers.

Also learning Ruby and Rails will only stand to you, and I'm sure the company that are offering you the internship will have lots of front end work for you to do also.

Highcontrast1

Graham wrote: »

What front-end experience have you got? Colleges are churning out basic html-wranglers by the boatload.

How many of these are you competent with; CSS, LESS, SASS, Bootstrap/Foundation, Javascript, Jquery, Angular, Ajax, version control, responsive web design, agile........

Thanks Graham.

I did not go to college but I am competent in all of the above except for Angular which I would say I am okish in. I have also delved into React and Polymer. I have built a few end to end applications using Meteor,Express,MySql, MongoDB, Handlebars (tests in Mocha, QUnit) run on the node run time. I have used npm and bower to manage my app packages. I also use gulp to automate some tasks.
I have been using git and github for about 9 months and recently started using git-flow in a team of 5.
I don't have any paid experience but i am building my portfolio. Also, I would hope to get an internship on the front-end if I pass up on the Ruby one, I do want to get that practical experience. I am just asking whether I should give up the Ruby one because I am afraid I won't get anything else, but think it might be better to wait and get what suits me rather than confuse myself starting a totally different thing from scratch.

Highcontrast1

redman85 wrote: »

In fairness I think with programming everyone is always in the learning stage

I would do the internship, I'm going into my final year of college and have done internships the last two summers. I probably learned more in those
6 months then then I did in the first 2 years of college. Its also a great opportunity to build up your portfolio, build small projects at the weekends and if you get stuck you can ask the senior developers.

Also learning Ruby and Rails will only stand to you, and I'm sure the company that are offering you the internship will have lots of front end work for you to do also.

hey redman.
Thanks for the reply. I couldn't agree more. Though I think I stand a more realistic chance of being employed as front-end person than as a full-stack person with only 3 months experience in RoR.

Highcontrast1

I know I'm being very argumentative and not taking anyones advice after I asked for it! But i guess what i really want to know/am waiting to hear is:

a)"there are way more RoR jobs in Dublin than front end jobs"

or

b) "i work for a web dev company, and we wouldn't hire anyone as a junior front end developer unless they had some small experience in back end work, such as ruby, go, etc even if they are learning node js etc"

Graham

Highcontrast1 wrote: »

I know I'm being very argumentative and not taking anyones advice after I asked for it! But i guess what i really want to know/am waiting to hear is:

a)"there are way more RoR jobs in Dublin than front end jobs"

or

b) "i work for a web dev company, and we wouldn't hire anyone as a junior front end developer unless they had some small experience in back end work, such as ruby, go, etc even if they are learning node js etc"

There probably aren't gazillions more RoR jobs than front-end jobs but why is that an issues? How many jobs would you need? Conversely there's probably 20 times the number of front-end developer jobs and approximately 1.84 bajillion front-end developers.

If there's lots of jobs in a particular category and lots of candidates in a particular category, that generally means lower pay. I'll emphasis the 'generally' part because from your other response it looks like you may have a fairly nice collection of front-end skills that (if you're competent) would set you apart from the vast majority of junior front-end developers.

What are you doing at the moment?
What does your portfolio look like (broadly speaking).
What sort of company would you like to work for?
What work do you enjoy doing?
What work do you dislike?
What will you be doing for the next 6 months if you do turn down your internship opportunity?

jester77

You should jump at the chance. Where I work we can't find good RoR devs, we are hiring them from all corners of the world. It may not be what you eventually want to do, but the experience will be invaluable. If you are in a good team, you will be working directly with UI, UX and front end devs, so you will pick up what those roles are about. And if it is a decent company you will be given the chance to work in those roles while there, just make yourself heard. Most companies who are serious about development have hack weeks every few months and you would have the opportunity to work in any role you wish during that time. I wouldn't turn down the chance of I were in your shoes.

bpmurray

Highcontrast1 wrote: »

Thanks Graham.

I did not go to college but I am competent in all of the above except for Angular which I would say I am okish in. I have also delved into React and Polymer. I have built a few end to end applications using Meteor,Express,MySql, MongoDB, Handlebars (tests in Mocha, QUnit) run on the node run time. I have used npm and bower to manage my app packages. I also use gulp to automate some tasks.
I have been using git and github for about 9 months and recently started using git-flow in a team of 5.
I don't have any paid experience but i am building my portfolio. Also, I would hope to get an internship on the front-end if I pass up on the Ruby one, I do want to get that practical experience. I am just asking whether I should give up the Ruby one because I am afraid I won't get anything else, but think it might be better to wait and get what suits me rather than confuse myself starting a totally different thing from scratch.

Do you have provable experience in anything? You quote all the cool web technologies, but do you actually have commercial experience delivering solutions using these technologies? If not, then go for the next best thing: any commercial experience, including Ruby/Rails.

And there are jobs for Ruby - lots of companies are using Chef for deployment automation.

OfflerCrocGod

I find F/E devs in Dublin to be valued lower/paid less than B/E devs. From what I could tell based on some interviews that would be due to the fact that there isn't much complex work being done on the F/E, if you want challenging and well paid F/E work there is a lot more in London. I'd say you might find it useful to gain real world B/E experience as to a lot of companies F/E === low skill.

Highcontrast1

bpmurray wrote: »

Do you have provable experience in anything? You quote all the cool web technologies, but do you actually have commercial experience delivering solutions using these technologies? If not, then go for the next best thing: any commercial experience, including Ruby/Rails.

And there are jobs for Ruby - lots of companies are using Chef for deployment automation.

Hi. Thanks for the response. I have most of my code on github and some stuff private(bitbucket). I have a deployed huge(ish) app that took 6 months to build(pairing). But ya, you are right about commercial experience... I took the ruby/ror offer.

Highcontrast1

OfflerCrocGod wrote: »

I find F/E devs in Dublin to be valued lower/paid less than B/E devs. From what I could tell based on some interviews that would be due to the fact that there isn't much complex work being done on the F/E, if you want challenging and well paid F/E work there is a lot more in London. I'd say you might find it useful to gain real world B/E experience as to a lot of companies F/E === low skill.

Thanks for the reply. I see what you mean. My plan was to slowly work my way to the back(fullstack ).

OfflerCrocGod

Highcontrast1 wrote: »

Thanks for the reply. I see what you mean. My plan was to slowly work my way to the back(fullstack ).

Please don't fall prey to the same conceits that other people in software development have.

https://twitter.com/bodil/status/649253126587981825