Rails is a Ghetto

Zed Shaw, a former big time Rails dev, is leaving the community. He has a scathing rant of the community as a whole as well as ThoughtWorks. I must say that some of Zed's stories sound really familiar to when I was doing a lot of consulting work. There are a hell of a lot of bad customers out there that want you devote your life to thier projects, make them a ton of money, and not pay you back for your work. More often than not, it's because they don't really have any money to spend and they are simply trying to get rich quick off of some really bad idea, or some really poor execution of a fairly good idea.

At the same time, there are even more really bad consultants out there, especially at the big companies. Zed's story about the ThoughtWorks guys charging premium rates for people with next to zero experience sounds pretty familiar. Someone I know got hired by IBM Global Services straight out of college. IBM was billing about $200 for his services and calling him an expert, with zero real world experience... the funny thing is that he was only making about 60k a year... so while IBM was charging an insane rate for his time, his actual salary did a much better job of showing how much he was really worth at the time. I remember hearing a story about a project he was on for some extremely large clients. The project was to be written in a language that just about no one on the team was familiar with (despite the fact that it was one of the most commonly used languages for such things... further pointing out the lack of experience on the team). Their first official task while they were on the client's dime: "learn X language." So, not only was IBM billing an insane rate, they were also charging the client to train their own employees! Must be nice.

Now, I haven't worked specifically with any ThoughtWorks developers, but I have worked on projects with some big name .NET consultants... and my experience with those consultants has been the same as Zed's. They come into your place, bill you for experts, and produce a load of crap that you could have paid some high school kid $10/hr to build instead. But they really don't care, because they were on .NET Rocks or wrote some bloated framework that cures cancer, and now everyone and their mom is trying to hire them. So they'll come into your place, bill you 5x as much for 10x as much code as it should have taken to do the job, leave when the crap hits the fan, and then move on to the next unsuspecting client.

[1] http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/rails_is_a_ghetto.html

11 Comments

  • But if i remember correctly, you were on .net rocks. And you were a high paid consultant as well. So are you speaking out of experience in regards to being over paid and under qualified?

    No, just busting your chops.

  • Haha. Nothing against being on .NET Rocks. It's a great show--with plenty of guests way smarter than myself, who would make great consultants. But choosing a consultant just because you heard them on .NET Rocks might not always be a good idea :)

  • Wow, not the most mature rant I've ever read. What adult wants to fight people?

  • Whoo, take two percocet and call me in the morning. Geez, and I thought my comments were borderline. This guy takes rants to a whole new level.

    Too bad he's right about a lot of things.

  • I can see your point Carl, but I've seen kids straight out of college being billed as experts. I've also seen 40 year old developers who haven't learned much since college being billed as experts. In fact, I would say that the vast majority of consultants I have encountered are far from experts. Like I said, I've never worked with TW (though I do happen to live right down the street from them now). I do think Martin Fowler is a genious, but when you hire TW, you aren't getting Martin.

  • Wow, I certainly didn't expect the news of Zed Shaw's rant to be here, much less one that wholly agrees with him!

    I wrote about Zed's rant myself (being a Ruby and Rails developer), and I must say that your take on this matter, coming from a .NET background, is really refreshing.

    When the rant first hit the blogosphere, a lot of non-Ruby and non-Rails zealots immediately jumped on the entire community, as if the problems Zed mentioned were exclusive to the Ruby and Rails world. But this proves what I've been trying to say all along: these things happen anywhere. No matter which technology or which industry, there are always people who bash you just to get ahead of you, and companies who just want to get paid insane amounts of cash while delivering sub-par products.

    So I personally thank you, Jesse, for sharing your stories as well, and proving that this isn't a technology-exclusive issue. Well done.

  • Those public attacks are vindictive, childish and purposefully malicious. They damage everyone who programs Ruby for a living. He is so self absorbed that if he was dying he would probably want to take the whole world with him. Congrats Zed, you successfully took your paranoid delusions of "the world against Zed" from imagination to reality.

    For those that think he is right about "things", we should consider the means that brought us to this end. Saddam is out of power. This is right. In the process we destroyed Iraq. This is wrong. Was it worth it? Make your own judgments.

    Good riddance Zed. No tears shed.

  • A few comments speaking as a non-rails impartial observer (1st time I ever heard of Zed was reading Rails is a ghetto):

    - I worked as a consultant, and worked with people straight out of college who were being billed as professionals. One person couldn't compile java from the command line after working there for 2 years.
    - One of the reason I liked Zed's post so much was because it was a total rant a la Maddox (thebestpageintheuniverse)
    - Again, speaking impartially, I think an outsider reading his rant knows there are 2 sides to every story, and in all likelihood someone like Zed who is great at ranting might be hard to get on with in real life.
    - But still, the commenter who posted "[Zed's rant] damage[s] everyone who programs Ruby for a living."??? I think if Zed is talking honestly about his experiences, you can't blame him if it turns people off Ruby. Maybe look at improving the community instead of blaming Zed?

  • TheBilliardPlayer: My point is that the community is solid, skilled, and professional. While entertaining, Zed's diatribe is way out of line. His rant is beyond honesty. Its borderline slander (and no I am not someone mentioned in his post). I don't blame Zed for anything but his own paranoid megalomania.

  • Interesting, a rails developer comment didn't have any curse words, despite it was still saying the community was the best and someone suck.

    Always anonymous, by the way. Are you scared of facing Zed?

    That's what will never change about the rails community.

    And about Iraq, well, define "destroyed".

  • I am with ThoughtWorks now. They had one girl there with 3 years of experience and was appointed the tech lead. She was overpowering, loud, rude and unpleasant. Ever heard of the phrase "An empty vessel makes the loudest noise when you drop a pin in it...."( or something like that ). They had an architect who hate Websphere even though the client ran all its applications on Websphere. They tried to push this framework that had no open source support called "Waffle" which worked very bad with Dojo and Websphere. Fortunately the client hired a few outside 6 month to hire consultants from Tek Sytems who had "real" experience and convinced the management to go Spring. One project was stuck in "Waffle" and has a lot of issues with Webshphere. The other is using Spring annotations and that team is doing fine. In the meantime, none of the ThoughtWorks staff had Spring and were learning it while they were doing the project. Oh by the way, the billing rate was $180 per Thoughtworks consultant while Tek charged $75 per Java Developer to the client. My view is the Tek consultants saved the project and ThoughtWorks ends up getting credit and possibly more projects. Other than their Agile methodology, ThoughtWorks is is a scam for unsuscpecting clients.

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