Interview with Obie Fernandez on The Rails Way and consulting practice at RailsConf 2014

Hi, it’s Mike with UGtastic. I’m here at RailsConf 2014. I’m standing here with Obi Fernandez who led a panel on the future of Rails jobs. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. Your panel, what do you mean by the future of Rails jobs and who was on the panel? Oh, sure. Well, Alan Grant, the co-founder of Hired, was one of the sponsors, sponsored the panel. Okay. He’s a friend of mine and we talked about what we could contribute to the conference and it seemed like a good idea, you know, given the amount of people that certainly would be here looking for jobs or looking to hire people, to have a discussion, you know, kind of a frank discussion about what is the future of our industry, you know, of our job market. And where’s it going? So, in addition to Alan, I invited Jeff Casimir, who has been involved in a lot of training initiatives and his latest thing is Turing School. Turing School? Yeah. He’s a J3 on Twitter? Yeah. I invited Corey Haynes, who’s like legendary and, you know, helps to train people in software craftsmanship all around the world. The Global Day of Code Retreat. Yeah, Code Retreat. I thought he would be a useful addition given how much talk there’s been about TDD and stuff like that. And, you know, he also trains up a lot of people and he’s CTO of a local company in Chicago. And Chad Pytel, who’s a friend and fellow author in the Addison-Wes ley ProRuby series. He runs SoftBot and hired people and does apprenticeships. So, yeah, he’s a really good friend and fellow author in the Addison-Wesley ProRuby series. He runs SoftBot and hired people and does apprenticeships. So, I thought between, you know, the bunch , we would have some good perspectives on where this market’s going. And you also have a history with the Railsway book series. Yeah, yeah. I’m editor of the Addison-Wesley ProRuby series. My latest book, The Rails Four Way, is coming out in print in a couple of weeks it’s uh out as a beta book on lean pub okay um you know so i mean that’s that’s that’s a lot of people who’ve been involved with the with the ruby and rails yeah definitely and i had you know i used to i used to own hash rocket uh sold it a few years ago but there you know we had 35 people plus yeah and then in chicago yeah miami exactly yeah jack sonville so so a lot of a lot of experience hiring um and and you know most of us are old- timers in the the ruby and rails world so um you know as we’re coming up on nine ten years like it’s a good time to look and see okay where we at and that was one of the big topics so what were some of the the uh um lessons or what were kind of materialized during the panel um it was it was interesting to hear um the panelists talk about where um where they see the most expansion and that would of course be kind of like on the junior end right there’s a lot of folks pouring into these training programs uh there’s a lot of folks coming out of that and and getting hired into shops where you know we hope that they’re going to get um adequate mentoring and and be able to work with folks that have more experience and be able to to get their skills um up to where they need to be because i am some of them are having you know anywhere in the world and they’re not going to be able to get their skills up to where from a few weeks of training to a few months of hands-on training and we had some back and forth about you know kind of what what do you need you know to crack into to the industry so it was overall the theme positive towards this this this trend or was it more of a kind of like i think it was i think it was i think it was positive with some notes of caution sounded you know and some some notes of wanting uh those of us in position to exercise leadership to to make sure that this doesn’t become a glut not in the sense of driving down wages but in the sense of um you know potentially affecting negatively affecting the quality level of projects you know resulting in more rescues needed and things like that that was really the only um you know kind of negative area of conversation we also talked about you know how much the freelancers make and and how much do you know to regular hires make and how do you hire them and advice for getting noticed by employers and things like that and i think that’s a really good point and i think that’s a really good point like that came up as well and i mean i also wonder if there ‘s the risk of association of ruby if a whole bunch of uh hundreds of or thousands of new bie developers are coming out and they know ruby on rails and they go into a project and then you know the project manager doesn’t understand that they’re just juniors there’s a bad name for ruby at rails and maybe developing an aversion to it just because of a false signal yeah i don’t know there’s a sense that could happen but you know i i have a feeling that a lot of these uh schools and training programs that that you know they’re helping with the placement they’re pretty active something that right now that jeff has definitely spoken to me personally about but came up a little bit in the panel um where they’re setting expectations you know correctly but for the folks that are getting into it you know there just seems to be no limit to the demand right you know so a lot of these you know 50 60 70 thousand dollars oh you know depending on the market that you’re going into yeah and depending on where they’re coming from that could be a huge bump i know one person i mentored was went from twenty thousand dollars to somewhere in that range yeah it’s like you can have a dramatic impact on their life on a person’s lives yeah and and we also talked about you know the the inverse of that which is when when you do have experience and you start making you know into the six figures how it how it ramps off you know we mentioned that we we don’t know too many people who who has employees in rails jobs are making like 200 000 or more right um and how it’s interesting that that that space between 100 and 200 the the thousands tend to lose significance right so just because an employer is offering say 150 versus 130 right it it doesn’t make that much of a difference if the culture and other softer factors are not there and and one of the things that i like about hired and one of the reasons that that i like alan and what he’s doing there is that they get the money discussion out of the way first so that the employee can can focus on the other issues yeah isn’t hired kind of where they have a like a tier you have to go through a certain amount of criterion to even the curate the you know you can sign up for hired but basically they curate who they have on there to set a minimum bar and then the employers um you know decide who they want to put the terms up front right you know so at that point um if i’m looking for a job my understanding is that i i can decide who has met my terms right off the bat so that i don’t go through a long interview process and then get to the stage where they make me an offer and it’s like oh i can’t work for a hundred thousand dollars in san francisco that’s impossible right you know or or whatever yeah whatever the case may be yeah very very frustrating so they invert that and i don’t know what they’re going to do so i’m just going to go ahead and say i’m just going to go ahead and say i’m just going to go ahead and say i’m just going to go ahead and say i’m just going sticker price is what you’re going to pay i think you’d be happy with that now yeah sure yeah so um you know just going back to some of your early history with with ruby on rails um i’m just curious you know you’ve written a number of books and an ongoing series and and with a pro ruby series uh how did you get started with with teaching and and being because this seems to be a theme inside of the community is that people teach and they they bring others up how did you get in the early days did you get involved in in publishing i mean i got pulled into it through through my activities in in blogging and i used to be someone who who had a well-read blog in the java world before i made the leap and then once i i got into to ruby in 2005 and became a loud evangelist for it it attracted a lot of attention and and back then that world was a lot smaller and it was a lot easier to get dialogues going and to you know you didn’t have to get lucky with hacker news in order for for everyone to read your stuff like it was actually a lot easier to to get heard yeah i know better single noise i know about the pain of getting people out to watch yeah definitely it’s a different it’s a different world now um but that said quality content always wins and um what it’s it’s interesting to see the community reinvent itself and kind of renew itself and what we’re seeing here is always just like the little tip of the iceberg uh granted you know when started out it was a really small iceberg and the people on the tip uh you know were those of us that were blogging and giving conference talks and stuff like that and everyone knew each other and it’s funny to see how over the years the the community that’s active and blogs and stuff like that the characters change and they morph and they evolve and they go off into other areas but it stays kind of relatively the same size but what’s been really amazing to watch um you know partly for me looking at the royalty checks and the size that they’re getting is how big the rails community has gotten i mean just hit the mainstream in our inner way that i think has exceeded our wildest dreams in the early days yeah that’s that’s something that maybe those of us who are just participating in the community might not see but being able to see like wow the total numbers of people buying these books is growing it does it grows every year and it just it goes and then you see you come to like this year ‘s rails comp and you see like you know how many people are hiring for rails jobs and who they are and like um companies continuing to switch over from dot net and java deployments and just redoing entire development department yeah tearing infrastructure out and starting over and it’s it’s it’s heartening to watch that the community keeps growing yeah and now if you’re on the other end of the spectrum of of your years of publishing uh are you looking at the change in the way books are published i mean in the early days it would have been hard yeah um and tomes but now it seems like things are moving towards uh ebooks is that something that you’re experiencing or moving towards uh it’s still you know if you want to write a book your best bet is to to start by self-publishing your ebook but uh you know keep it keep in mind that traditional publishers are happy to sign ebook authors and a lot of times we’ll just take your ebook and you know maybe with some editing or something you know or whatever publish it as a print book and uh there is still a lot of value in being published with a prestigious publishing house like like actually wesley or riley or w iley uh you know where you know it gives you credibility and that’s what it’s all about yeah you know how to get that that people will have that automatic trust oh i know that publisher publishes good books exactly i’m gonna give this book a chance you know it really does wonders for your career um testament to that you know it’s once you get a book published it’s a great book it’s a great book it’s a great book published uh people start looking to you as an authority yeah well again thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me i really appreciate it my pleasure thanks a lot thanks user groups with lots to say interviews and more no way sharing great ideas in the tech community fascinating conversations a plethora of information find out for yourself today 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