Ruby – London Technology Employment Snapshot

Here, a Technology Sector Talent and Skills Overview, specifically for the London Ruby market, based on ADLIB internal data and knowledge.

Sector overview

Ruby, an absolute gem when it comes to choosing a programming language. Although originally released in 1995, Ruby didn’t find fame as such until 2006 and has now grown to be a popular choice for many developers with over 300,000 professional Ruby developers working worldwide, and close to 1 million developers who are learning or who have touched upon this skill. Ruby is a popular choice when it comes to coding, it’s great for eCommerce, widely used for Content Management Systems, and with it being highly agile, Ruby is a perfect choice or building SaaS applications. The Ruby on Rails Community is strong and is being used by some of the giants of our time, including, Twitter, AirB&B, Shopify, and GitHub. Currently, there are hundreds of UK based companies who use Ruby as their core function.

Talent overview

There is no denying that there is a need for experienced Ruby developers with AI on the rise, and with it being a strong choice for any type of web applications and API based applications – but 2023 has been a tough year for tech! Organisations like Le Wagon is teaching students Ruby as one of their first programmes because it is such a great learning tool, and Le Wagon find that Ruby is one of the most transferrable languages in terms of syntax and logic. City Operations Manager, Anna Putt from Le Wagon says:

“By teaching Ruby first our students tend to pick up subsequent languages more quickly and understand the core concepts of coding. This is even more relevant today as coding languages are evolving so quickly and we see so many of our graduates going into roles at places like Meta and Google where they utilise their own programming languages. Languages like Ruby are great on a Software Developers CV because it shows they are adaptable to any languages their workplace might require”.

Skills in demand

Going off a few of the specialist Ruby job boards, having strong Ruby & RoR experience is high up on the list, being able to write effective and scalable code in Ruby, and expertise in building back-end components for web applications. Are you using the latest Ruby and RoR versions? Have you had to perform any large scare updates to the latest version? Things to keep in mind, a lot of roles look at your problem-solving skills, how would you tackle a problem, and can you find a solution quickly? How well you work remotely as a lot of jobs are these days, and how you can communicate with the rest of the team. Collaboration is important in many businesses and being able to find that balance between your own contributions and collaborative teamwork seems to be key! Moving to a new role always has its tricky points but demonstrating that you are willing to learn and quickly pick up new tools and ways of working will be highly advantageous.

• Back-end skills – Ruby, Ruby on Rails.
• Front-end skills – Webpack, JavaScript, HTML, CSS – Frameworks (Vue.js, React).
• Databases – MySQL, PostgreSQL, Sidekiq, ElasticSearch.