Technology for Consulting (PHP or Ruby on Rails)?

Community
1

What technology is better for a consultant to focus on?

Ruby on Rails - the hot new language. Great frameworks. Salary.com reports full time salaries pay about 35-40% more for RoR developers. Downside - a lot harder to find good RoR developers and I suspect its mostly startups (SaaS) who hire for RoR jobs, and they generally don’t employ consultants.

PHP - easy language to source and write. According to Nicholas Carr, technology will become a commodity anyway … so perhaps we’re better off focusing on our application of the technology anyway, with things such as SEO, Social, conversion optimization, etc. Ironically these skills have a lot lower reported full time salaries, but they seem to align well with consulting.

Thoughts?

2

You should be considering things like

  • Your medium/long term goals. That not only includes how much you want to make in 1-3 years, but also what job you want to have.
  • what’s your passion. This will affect your job. It is so much easier when you love your job.
  • How much you earn today (well, your general status today)
  • What you know today.
  • What skills you need to learn to get to the position you want to have
  • If you want to freelance, own your own company and have employees, or if you work for someone else.
  • How many hours you want to work per day and the kind of family you want (basically, if you want to spend time with your family and friends and be General Manager of IBM, it’s going to need a whole new level of organizational skills :))

This kind of stuff. You need to do a plan of what you need to get to where you want from where you are. But first you need to know where you are, what you want and then figure out how you want to get there. :slight_smile:

Things like this.

3

Every consultancy based on a single technology or stack is pretty much doomed to fail long-term.

4

What are some of those variables? Agreed, needing to enjoy what you do is one variable … but so is building a long-term viable business. Thus I want to make sure I have a 360 view of this thing, before making a decision.

5

It is a tough question and there are too many variables to consider. Salary is important but what you like and your goals in life are too, and what you like. You should always choose something you are keen at least, and if you love it even better.