This thread seems to be getting some views. I'm looking to break into the Rails work, but it seems rough trying to get into a job doing Rails work as a junior, not quite senior role. I have other development experience, primarily in Ruby and Objective-C.
Any advice? I know the job market is a bit of a rough one right now as well.
For Juniors it's tough (in general, though it's always been tougher in rubyland), because even the most well organized codebases tend to turn into a bit of dynamic magic spaghetti that can be hard to follow if you're not familiar with Ruby's dynamic nature. Getting newcomers to the language/framework onboarded to old projects (and most Rails projects will be old ones these days) can be a bit of a mess and take a lot of time and effort, so a lot of companies are weary of getting juniors.
That said, if you can display you have knowledge of the more important Rails libraries like ActiveRecord, ActiveJob, how Rails handles the MVC pattern etc., then your chances are much better. It's a bit of a magical framework when you first start working with it, so it's important to know what it does behind the scenes, at least a tiny bit, since otherwise it's easy to get lost.
If you are looking to become more competitive as a candidate, I strongly recommend that you look at one of the more popular languages / frameworks instead of focusing on Ruby on Rails.
Despite the major investment made by Stripe and Shopify, my experience is similar to that of this commenter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40161561 - like them, I've found the open source libraries available in the Ruby + Rails ecosystem to be aging and less well supported than that of more popular languages / frameworks like GoLang / Java / Python.
Rails is delightful to work in and very thoughtfully constructed, and the Rails community is helpful and welcoming. However, if your priority is to maximize your chances at getting hired, I would look towards GoLang / Java / Python etc, which are far less enjoyable to work in but far easier to find jobs for.
My advice would be to either start contributing to an existing FOSS ruby gem or to create your own for some specific purpose.
That will allow you get familiar with the ecosystem so that you can hit the ground running and also allow you to point to experience during the screen and interview phases.
Any advice? I know the job market is a bit of a rough one right now as well.