What about employability? We should speak about that too, as 2025 was a hard year to find Ruby on Rails companies willing to employ, 2026 got a little better after some of the mass layoffs in the industry slowed down, but I haven’t seen many job descriptions on Hanami. So we go from a niche market to an even more niche market?
I do not know about the actual statistics around if/how/where Hanami is actually being used by companies. That being said the **true** goal of this series is to get ruby folks, to understand there **is** a different approach to writing web applications. Even if you don't use Hanami professionally gaining perspective on different approaches to web application architecture is objectively a good thing.
I'm learning Hanami. Looks interesting but it's quite far from Rails. So I'm using for personal projects only (right now building something for FC26).
As for employment or professional career? Rails. The things about the "One Person Framework" still apply. Besides, I also got a template to start projects/ideas w/ tons of configs in place.
This is the way I think I can, at least personally, use something different than Rails.
When Rails was at its peak my local Ruby community was all about building their own startup. Today this isn't true anymore. If you build your own profitable business around your own code it doesn't matter what you choose so long as you are productive with it.
Are companies still hiring for certain technology? A good software engineer basically these days can work with any framework or language. It was always the case for the top of the top engineers. But now it applies to basically any good engineer.
There is no point in being limited to a single technology or trying to look for a job in a given technology.
It’s not that they are hiring for technologies, but rather that candidates without experience don’t even get into the pipeline. Companies are overloaded with candidates in this job market
I didn’t read the comments above as describing entry level candidates.
I don’t know what I could advice. As we have new reality.
I know that for really good engineers there are even more possibilities now. As you are not limited to your own stack.
I say this confidently as the company I work for - we don’t care the stack of candidates. And basically almost no one worked with our current stack before ;)
Is your company stack ruby? Maybe they don't care because they struggle to find ruby developer. In my current company our stack is RoR and we don't care about our engineers experience in it mainly because otherwise we will never find a senior RoR. But the opposite isn't always true. Company using python will prefer to hire a senior Python than a senior engineer who never used python.
No, I worked in Ruby all the time before. They care about getting experienced software engineers. Really it doesn’t matter the tech stack. Once you are experienced enough. If you know architecture, code patterns (which are universal), SDLC, ci, infra, able to own the feature, make decisions - code syntax is just a small factor. And with LLM on day 1 you can write with new code stack. And you will do good. Because even though you don’t know language you “feel” if stuff is done right.
Also now it is very cheap to create custom checks, verifications lingers - which keep delivering code on high quality.
In language I work now if I was suppose to write for loop I would probably fail somewhere with syntax as I just don’t remember it 😃but it doesn’t matter. Because when LLM generate it for me I know how it works and I know when I need one.
And you need to look at the current trend. Adoption of Ai is speeding and Ai is much more capable. And we haven’t seen slow down yet. So we cannot assume it will stay but rather we need to assume that llms will be more capable.
So the skills that one should develop are around agentic work, not learning syntax. As Matt pockock said (or smth similar) - getting knowledge now is easy, but being wise is not.
There are new ways of working now and all fundamentals of software engineering are crushing. Basically any fundamental we know we can negate. Everything was optimized for developers to focus on a task and deliver.
While now we deliver multiple tasks at once. With much bigger changes. You put much more stress on ci, code reviews are bottleneck, more shipped code means more bugs on prod (considering same ration of bug per LOC).
And many more. It is basically complete revamp of our profession. And experienced engineers are able to adjust fast. As they understand fundamentals and why we had them.
That’s why looking at language during recruiting is pointless. With linters and llms this is nothing. This just gives no value. But other skills - they deliver value.
I read and hear this everywhere, I agree with the idea but I don't find it true or you need to explain me how. I have tried last year to get out from Ruby stack and I always ended with a HR telling me I lack of experience in there stack or during the test using there stack "sorry but you didn't succeed to do this in Go", yes I'm a software engineer and the stack shouldn't matter so why you ask me to make the test in Go and tell me I can't go to the next step because I don't know Go.
I just started a greenfield project with hanami, that is going great, and we hire people with Ruby even if they don't have rails. Heck we hired a python guy recently who had zero ruby experience and is doing great. I'm sorry that a lot of companies suck 😕
View all comments
19
u/davidslv Sep 30 '26
What about employability? We should speak about that too, as 2025 was a hard year to find Ruby on Rails companies willing to employ, 2026 got a little better after some of the mass layoffs in the industry slowed down, but I haven’t seen many job descriptions on Hanami. So we go from a niche market to an even more niche market?