How long have we all been working with Ruby on Rails?

One of the questions we asked in the recent survey was "How many years have you been developing with Ruby on Rails?". The purpose of this question is to get a very general idea of the shift in experience across the community.

Before we dive into the results, it's worth noting that this is a survey from a relatively small sample set (compared to the community as a whole). We don't know what the margin of error is here. Therefore, I'm not going to present anything as a conclusion.

The results from this question were:

• Less than 1 year - 4%
• 1-3 years - 23%
• 4-6 years - 35%
• 7-9 years - 25%
• 10+ years - 13%

There are two notable points here. Firstly, in the upper range, we can see that people with over 7 years experience account for 38% of the responses. That's a fairly long time for somebody to be working with the framework and this suggests a strong, maturing community. On the opposite side of the spectrum, only 4% of responders have used Rails for less than 1 year. The first thought that comes to mind is whether this confirms the opinions of people that say Rails is no longer relevant. The main counter-arguments to this are that the 1-3 years group is a sizable amount and we may not have reached Rails newcomers with this survey.

If we take a look at the responses in previous years we can compare how the distribution has changed. Here are the results from 2014:

• Less than 1 year - 6.49%
• 1-3 years - 32.47%
• 4-6 years - 44.16%
• 7+ years - 16.88%
• 10+ years - NA

Note that due to the different answers we had in the last survey I have had to combine some answers ranges. Interestingly, the difference in the 'Less than 1-year' group is not what I would consider significant (down 2.49%). The largest change can be seen in the 1-3 years range, where there has been a drop of 9.47%. Again, there could be a variety of reasons for this. Some of these people may have answered '4-6 years' in this year's survey while the number of newcomers decreased (or people stopped using the framework).

As I have already mentioned, this survey has a response rate that is a fraction of the Rails community. There were 1,417 responses at last count. Therefore, I think the data is interesting, but it's not possible to draw solid conclusions from this.