Finding a Ruby on Rails developer job here in North Carolina fucking sucks. I got through three sets of interviews and they told my recruiter I aced them and answered their questions flawlessly but instead of hiring a ruby developer to 1-3 years of experience they now want to hire a software architect with 4-6 years of experience. This company wasted both of our times.

Finding Ruby developer jobs is hard and I’m looking into whether I should switch to another tech stack to make my job search easier.

Thoughts?

Have you considered remote jobs, or remote contract/freelance work like via Upwork?

You could start looking for positions that value your experience more than your specific Tech Stack and be open minded about learning the specific stack that's required by the company. Additionally you could research companies that you'd Like to Work at and start learning their stack in your free time

@poly I do some consulting but looking for a full time salaried position.

@don-rager technical interviews tend to ask you questions about their tech stack. In my recent rails interview they wanted to know about associations, unit testing, and caching and how I’d do these things on Rails. Unless that’s not a standard practice (has been for the last two companies I interviewed at). So I guess that’s easier said than done.

@AppleLover I know JavaScript and some Python. Also looking at C#. I hate Java with all my heart.

Sounds like you were used as a stalking horse to check a box. The NC market is kind of swamped anymore thanks to UNC Chapel Hill farming foreign students tuition and upconverting degrees.

You're at a bit of a disavantage, the odds of you out-credentialing most of your competition are pretty low there. Half the people I know from there have moved for that reason.

It's definitely hard to find Ruby or Rails positions. I'm assuming it is because all of the devs filling them are happy and simply don't want to leave. Also, we tend to be paid well, so companies don't want to hire more of us than they absolutely need.

As @poly mentioned, you could look for remote jobs, too. I'm currently working for a company in Cali, and actually getting a Cali salary despite living in Nevada! 😊

But moving to a different tech stack isn't a bad thing, either. Quite the opposite, actually: it will teach you
to think about things differently, different approaches to problems, different patterns, etc. The more you learn and the more you read, the better you will be. I highly recommend learning as many languages as you can, such as Rust, Go, JS, Lisp, C, etc. -- and normally I would include Ruby in this list. Learn what you can, and continue to use whichever languages you like best (such as Ruby 😉), and apply all that you've learned.

Either way, best of luck with your search!