Some of the behavior of the site varies based on whether or not you're on a touch device - we're keenly aware of there being different usability concerns between desktop and mobile devices. But your point is well-taken. If there are specific areas where we're preserving a particular desktop-esque or mobile-esque paradigm at the expense of UX, it's probably something we need to address.
It's largely a semantics game. Some people use one to refer to device-responsiveness versus screen-resolution-adaptiveness. Under that definition, both apply to our redesign :-)
"Years of Experience" along with "Degree" are objective requirements that can simplify hiring. Some companies will be hard and fast about them, others will be more flexible.
But to note, if you want to claim that you have outstanding reasons why lack of years, or a degree, or a certification, or whatever ought to be disregarded, figure out why that is, and emphasize it.
If you have an active GitHub profile, an interesting blog, a self-published book - a great many recruiters will overlook their objective benchmarks.
Focus on your strengths, shore them up, and advertise them. Time wasted complaining that some recruiters are inflexible is not only pointless; it takes time away that you could be using to do something positive.
I don't understand this. Selective dissemination of actual business data - fine, sue their asses. But projections are guesses - guesses without any guarantees. Facebook could magically rake in a billion tomorrow, or completely shut down - "projections" aside.
Why is it that there's a legal recourse because the projections person X got were different from what person Y got?
Enterprise Rails applications aren't for beginners. But this pervasive attitude that all of Rails is beyond beginners is an abdication of responsibility.
If a newbie still can't build a Rails blog in ten minutes, let's address that. "Rails is not for beginners" is shorthand for "I can't be bothered to support beginners"
It's certainly a reputation that has managed to stick with the Rails community for a while. And we're trying to get the jerks to shut up ;-)
And while I can say that Rails is fantastic, and in my opinion, the best framework out there, I'm also going to tell you: unless someone's willing to sit down and show you, don't listen to them. That said, there are many people who _aren't_ jerks, and are more than willing to help you reimplement Google Maps. A lot of them can be found at RailsMentors.org
My solution was simply to recommend personalized tutoring via RailsMentors.org - as you can really learn from any development stack. It's just finding the right combination that can be very difficult for a new developer.
You bring up some very good suggestions - we need a better metric for whether things are stable, supported, etc. And you're absolutely right, Google won't work, and download counts won't work. I would be interested in seeing something like you've suggested though, essentially coming up with a "trust" system for different libraries.
At the same time, you have the experience available to test whether a gem runs on 1.8 or 1.9, where a new developer doesn't know how to read stack traces yet. Providing one-on-one support helps tackle this issue (RailsMentors.org), as would increased tutorials that try and _limit_ the range of choice, rather than overload the developer with too much.
Of course, these are just my own thoughts on how we can address the problem. I'm hopeful that by discussing it, people can come up with some additional solutions.
The article is meant to be taken as satire, but do consider that if you're a new developer and you go a'Googling, you're going to encounter JRuby, and Rubinius, and Macruby.
It would be silly to throw all of these items at a new developer, and no teacher in their right mind would ever do that.
But if you're trying to pick up the language on your own...that's what you'll see.
A lot of it is noise, absolutely. But while I wrote this as satire, it's based on the experiences I've seen from new developers. If you didn't know any better, it could be easy to think that Rails devs all use Rails 3, are completely swept up in the NoSQL movement, and don't have libraries that will run on Ruby 1.8
Really this article was designed to point out that an overabundance of choice - even though they're great choices - can be harmful to new developers. And people should consider joining things like RailsMentors.org right now. Because more than ever, this is a time where one-on-one mentoring is all but necessary.
As far as greener pastures...I'd hate to see the day when any community measures itself by comparison to other communities, rather than on its own accomplishments.