~“The easiest way to hire a senior is to hire them five years beforehand”
I went to Brighton Ruby this year for the first time ever. Armed with less than a year of exposure to Ruby/Rails and an education ticket, I caught the train down to Brighton to see what developer conferences were all about. In short, they are brilliant, this one was anyways.
Honestly, I would love to deep dive into every talk and break the day down minute-by-minute, but frankly, Rosa’s talk on Gödel’s incompleteness theorem started the day, and while I understood aspects of it, it set the common theme throughout the day. Said theme being that I did not understand everything from any talk in a way substantial enough to warrant thinking my opinions are worth voicing, outside of saying all of the speakers did an incredible job.
My main apprehension for the day would be feeling like a small fish in a big pond, which I reckon is a normal feeling for most. This is partially down to how it feels to be in the current junior job market, especially one as scarce as the Ruby community, and this is what I wanted to focus on with this writing.
If I open my TikTok, I’ll probably stumble onto some video in ~10 scrolls or so that carries some tone of superiority or cynicism, including:
- If you don’t understand IaC, you’ll never make it as a software engineer
- Not using [JS framework of the week] is the reason you’re being ghosted
- Your CV is not 100% ATS compliant, so some AI hiring manager is casting you into the void
- You’re writing TypeScript wrong!! Use these 19 obscure design patterns instead
- AI will do everything a junior can, but faster!!!!!!!!!!!
My LinkedIn is a litany of equally outrageous (sometimes more so) posts about the state of the industry, the influence of AI, 20 best ways to implement XYZ, the one weekend project that will get you hired, etc. As expected, all of these were trumped by the state of X, but my account doesn’t exist there anymore, so I cannot be bothered to recall the posts.
This doesn’t typically faze me, as the majority of it reads as desperate reaches to feel smart or it’s rage bait for the ad-sense payments, but as sand can erode a mountain, over time I’ve noticed I’m having to pay more attention to seeing it for what it is. As such, I had to consciously remind myself that while I very well could have been the least experienced person at Brighton Ruby, everyone there had at one point been in a similar position, so had no reason to cast judgement about it.
In the end no one did cast judgement about it, obviously. In fact, the market for juniors was explicitly mentioned multiple times and was followed with nothing but acknowledgement (and sympathy) from everyone else in the room.
Andy made his stance quite clear, as seen from the title. While Amanda from the Rails Foundation was open about their intentions to try and drive Rails back into various curriculums while trying to find some way to incentivise companies into placing juniors as the framework continues to attract new people.
While some of the largest voices claim AI is coming for everyone and that software development is becoming more competitive, Brighton Ruby was a shining reminder of how important community is and how the loudest voices aren’t always the correct ones.
To everyone that spoke on stage and everyone that spoke to me directly, thank you for sharing your knowledge in such thorough, well-structured ways.
To Andy, thank you for putting on such a brilliant event and being so welcoming with the beach towels, coffee, stickers, and free IPA. Hopefully in a few years I’ll be on the stage with the individuals I look up to now, fueled by the knowledge I’m helping pave the way for individuals in the circumstance I am now, facilitated by individuals as brilliant as yourself.
If you’ve gotten this far, apologies that the rest of this website is devoid of meaningful content—it is well and truly in its infancy.
You can find me at these places; I’m always happy to talk about most things: github bluesky linkedin