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Ask HN: Do RoR Developers Fall Within the 95/5% Rule?

4 points by Hume62 ↗ HN
In doing lots of research for potential Rails developers I seem to be hitting either:

5%: Individual developers with great online reputations, lots of blog entires, contributors to several gems/plugins as well as books; but are "not available for hire" either because they are too busy, or are somehow able to hold down a full-time job at a firm in addition to all their valuable community work.

95%: Individual developers or small development shops with nicely laid out web sites but "portfolios" that are extremely thin and/or seem to be on the very low end of the complexity scale.

Have others had the same experience? Any outliers?

5 comments

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patio11
I'm by no means a top-flight Rails programmer (or programmer, for that matter), but be that as it may I am occasionally contacted for various types of consulting. (Frequently SEO or marketing because I'm sort of good at those.) I tell them that I'm busy. This is both true and not true. I am busy -- I run my own business, have a day job, and do occasionally like to have free time. But if you dangled a big enough check in front of my nose, I could be less busy in a hurry.

"Not available for hire" is a polite fiction that I tell people to avoid saying "I'm not available for hire at any price near what you are willing to pay". You can sort of tell, right?

"Hey, I read your blog and saw that you were a Rails developer. Cool! How much would it cost for you to do a simple five-page website?" => "Oh, terribly sorry, I'm busy. (Forever.)"

"Hey, you seem to be pretty good at SEO? Could I hire you for some consulting work? How much could I get for $500?" => "Oh, terribly sorry, I'm busy."

More broadly I think that contract programming gets progressively less attractive the better you get at being a businessman. Even if you command premium rates (and you darn well better command premium rates if you're that good), if you just buy your own time for a few weeks and then release the app that people were going to pay you to write, then you can scale your income past the number of hours you invest. Far past. Programmers are smart people, most of them are capable of doing this math.

xg
The nature of consulting (no ongoing support) means that most apps built by consultants are trivial. That doesn't mean they aren't talented programmers, but it also means that if you're looking for something that could legitimately be a 10k line Rails App you may want to think about whether it's appropriate to even be hiring a consultant.

Also, a lot of people that are famous for "community work" are the last people you want to be working with in the trenches.

Hume62
Good points thanks. Best-case scenario would be a 20K-50K project on a consulting basis, that might turn into a full-time gig if the idea proves viable. Still seems like work of this size falls between the cracks...
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