[LRUG] Ghosttown

Tue Mar 3 15:03:11 PST 2026

It seems clear to me that when Jon said "The main ruby discord has a jobs
channel..." and Ian asked "There's a main ruby discord???".  The discord
that Jon was referring to, and thus that Ian wanted the link to, was the
discord linked from https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/community/ (e.g.
https://discord.gg/ad2acQFtkh )

That doesn't mean there's no reason to bring up the other ruby discord that
Greg mentioned, but it's, at best, disingenuous not to mention it wasn't
the one Jon was referring to, which is what Chris and Matthew reacted to.

It seems that both Greg and Matthew agree that this other discord was
started by people who were banned from the one linked to from ruby-lang.org.
I can't find a public write-up of moderation decisions to verify either
side of the story of _why_ some people were banned.  There are plenty of "X
was banned because ..." statements with plenty of "oh but that's not
true..." statements, but there are no receipts from either side that I can
find, and, TBH, I wouldn't really expect to find such statements as they
mostly invite "well, actually..." rules lawyering.

While both discords do exist for rubyists to discuss ruby in, one is linked
to from ruby-lang.org and the other isn't, so regardless of anything else
one of them can more reasonably claim to be the "main" ruby discord.

I don't really think this mailing list is the place to litigate why people
were banned from one discord or what motivated them to start an
alternative, so let's focus on discussing whether or not the job market in
general is a ghost town, or just the ruby job market.

---

So, putting my money where my mouth is: as someone who recently moved jobs
I don't think it's a ghost town, but it was a more challenging job hunt
than I've faced previously.  I do hope you all came to our Feb meeting and
saw Jade's excellent talk on how to navigate the job hunt!

Anecdotally it feels like there are fewer small orgs trying new product
ideas in ruby, but about the same number of larger orgs hoovering up any
and all rubyists they can find.  The actual large orgs change every so
often, but there's always roughly the same number, which is promising ...
for now.  The reduction in smaller orgs using ruby feels to me like it's
gonna make the market for rubyists tougher in the next cycle (say 5 years
out) though: the current crop of large orgs will die off or go polyglot
microservices to deal with demand for talent, but won't _all_ be replaced
by the "winners" of the current crop of smaller orgs becoming large (on
pure numbers there aren't enough for this funnel to work).

But maybe, as others have mentioned here and elsewhere, ruby will become
the defacto language of the AI coder because it's the easiest to read, and
we'll need that to deal with the hyper-inflated klocs of code the agents
produce. 🤷

Cheers,

Murray

On Tue, 3 Mar 2026 at 22:16, Greg Molnar via Chat <chat at lists.lrug.org>
wrote:

> This is not true. It was started because they banned a lot of people who
> stood up for DHH when the mods of that Discord started Plan Vert to remove
> DHH from Rails Core.
> But feel free to avoid or join either one, just don't spread false
> information please.
>
> On Tue, Mar 3, 2026, at 4:52 PM, eightbitraptor via Chat wrote:
>
> This is a discord that was started by some folks who were banned from the
> official ruby discord for code of conduct violations.
>
> Personally I'd avoid.
>
> https://github.com/ruby/www.ruby-lang.org/pull/3639
>
> Matthew Valentine-House
> http://eightbitraptor.com
>
> On Tue, 3 Mar 2026, 16:22 Greg Molnar via Chat, <chat at lists.lrug.org>
> wrote:
>
>
> If anyone wants to join: https://discord.com/invite/qfnMkxbBug
>
> On Tue, Mar 3, 2026, at 7:58 AM, Ian Moss via Chat wrote:
>
> There is a main ruby discord???
>
> --
> Ian Moss
> alter.is | ruby & product consultancy services.
> http://www.linkedin.com/in/alteris | +447427242195
>
>
> ----- Original message -----
> From: Jon Rowe via Chat <chat at lists.lrug.org>
> To: London Ruby Users Group <chat at lists.lrug.org>
> Cc: Jon Rowe <mail at jonrowe.co.uk>
> Subject: Re: [LRUG] Ghosttown
> Date: Friday, 13 February 2026 12:02
>
> The main Ruby discord also has a jobs channel which has a very active
> hiring channel albiet its pretty much all automatic postings from
> https://rubyonremote.com/ but I'm not sure I've seen many UK-centric
> roles there.
>
> On Thu, 12 Feb 2026, at 1:16 PM, Greg Molnar via Chat wrote:
>
> My 2 cents...
> I don't know where you guys are looking, but these job boards have Rails
> opportunities:
>
> https://railshotwirejobs.com/
> https://jobs.gorails.com/
> https://jobs.rubyonrails.org/
>
> Besides these, every conference I went to last year, I've seen many
> companies hiring, and not all of them advertise those jobs(or at least I
> did see them advertised). There are also Ruby related discords, like the
> Gorails one or the one I started a while ago, there are job postings on
> both that are not advertised elsewhere.
> I am not saying it is easy to get hired, the high number of
> applications(most AI generated) make it hard on the hiring side too, but if
> you write a good application and you have a good profile, I think you can
> land a job. Maybe not as quickly and maybe not as well paid as 10 years ago
> though, when we had a golden age and Ruby devs were able to demand high
> salaries and amazing work conditions. But times change, and who know, maybe
> we will get back to that in a while.
> As for the entry level jobs, that was always hard, except the precovid
> ZIRP period when they hired people that didn't even know how to use git.
> And I remember how hard it was for me almost 15 years ago when I
> transitioned to Ruby. 5 years ago this was blamed on Covid, now it is
> blamed on AI, 5 years from now it will be blamed on something else.
>
> So in overall, I think we are fine, not as good as used to be, but if you
> make an effort, you can likely find work. If you struggle, you might need
> to work on your skills(tech or human). Start a blog, contribute to open
> source, go to conferences and you will end up with a better profile a good
> network and will likely not suffer when looking for a job.
>
> Good luck to all the jobseekers out there.
>
> On Wed, Feb 11, 2026, at 3:12 PM, Benjamin Eskola via Chat wrote:
>
> If everyone's claiming it, does your CV really stand out by claiming it?
>
> Anyway, that's even assuming it *is* an amplifier. In many cases it seems
> to be a longwinded (and expensive) way of doing what would be easier to
> just do oneself.
>
> Regards,
>
> Ben
>
> > On 11. Feb 2026, at 13.53, Igor via Chat <chat at lists.lrug.org> wrote:
> >
> > Agree with Eleanor. In today’s world, the smartest move might be to
> embrace AI as an amplifier, using it to boost your impact and make your CV
> stand out, while still highlighting the problem-solving and critical
> thinking only humans can provide.
> >
> > On Wed, 11 Feb 2026 at 13:49, Eleanor McHugh via Chat <
> chat at lists.lrug.org> wrote:
> > Best Outcome?
> >
> > Bubble grow large.
> >
> > Bubble go pop.
> >
> > Employers rediscover that programmers don't just regurgitate code: they
> understand problems and devise solutions.
> >
> > Judging by previous hype cycles, this could take a while...
> >
> >
> > > On 11 Feb 2026, at 11:10, Michael Pavling via Chat <
> chat at lists.lrug.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > Well... The jobs market looks pretty bleak, doesn't it?
> > >
> > > There seems to be no entry-level roles now, and the mid/senior roles
> are few and far between, with hundreds of applicants scrabbling to stand
> out with their AI tuned CVs :-(
> > >
> > > What's gonna be the case in a couple of years? (Or even at the end of
> this year)
> > > Is that it for Ruby jobs now? Is it the end for almost all tech
> stacks? 😬
> > >
> > > Do we all just need to re-align to be maintainers of the output?
> > >
> > > *sigh* What's everyone's hope for a best outcome?
>
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