December 17, 2009 00:15
Posted by Jeremy Durham
How do you find good Rails developers?
At Work, we’re continuing the search for good Rails developers (or good general developers who want to do Rails) that live in the Boston area.
A reoccurring theme in the search is that very few developers are writing tests. Only about 4 out of 10 developers we talk to have Rails experience, and out of those maybe 1 out of 10 (if we’re lucky) write tests regularly.
Where do you find good Rails developers when hiring? Do you find the same issues with Rails developers not writing tests?
3 Comments
December 23, 2009
Writing tests is important, but not always necessary. Why does it matter if they have always been heavy test writers? Because of the skill or knowledge in writing tests?
Some developers haven’t written tests because previous teams didn’t do it, or the framework didn’t really support unit testing, or what have you.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but unit testing isn’t the hardest thing for a developer to pick up, and if you really want to keep your code base maintainable though tests, then just making sure the developer is on board with unit testing most of the time and willing to learn, isn’t that good enough?
December 24, 2009
Good points. Looking through our code, we have a 1 to 1.2 code to test ratio. That’s not including cucumber stories, so the majority of the typing we do is writing tests. We’d really love to bring in a Rails developer that can teach us a thing or two about how they write tests, but the problem is that we can’t find many Rails developers who are even writing tests, let alone well.
I guess I just expected the percentage of Rails developers writing tests to be higher; just wondering if people see the same sort of percentages when they interview Rails developers.
You’re right about writing tests not being hard. All of our developers didn’t actively written tests when they started, but they’re all very good at it now and seem to really enjoy it. We’re always happy to hire developers who are new to Rails, testing, and such as help them along, but we’d also love to hire someone who has some different opinions on it so we can improve our process.
July 31, 2010
Recruit down South! Well… it worked once. I know this is probably an old blog post, but your site shows new entries in Google Reader since your site update.
A comment on testing. At my old job it was a luxury that we never had because of unrealistic time constraints for projects. The best we could hope for was a visual confirmation that things were working as they should be. As you can imagine, we were constantly finding issues, and refactoring was almost impossible to do without inadvertently breaking something. I don’t know if Beacon is unique, but I would wager that anyone coming from a mixed development environment, or that develops on the side is going to constitute the other 6 out of 10 folks you are describing. I was one of them.
A final note – tests are more likely written when they can be quickly implemented and run. I am not sure how Capybara, and especially Selenium fit into a typical testing cycle, but they sure are time consuming. The most you will probably find is someone with good a Rspec background.
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