How to hire a Ruby programmer?

Question

Project management

A trading company engaged in the Internet sales of certain specific goods bought a ready-made engine (unpopular - not a certain Bitrix, that is), developed by a company specializing in engines for the corresponding goods. The engine seems to be quite good, modern technologies are used (RoR, PostgreSql, Redis, Unicorn, Ansible, Capistrano), the authors of the engine make a harsh impression.
Now we want to modify this engine for ourselves. The plans are significant. Therefore, we need a Ruby developer (well, we also need a front-ender and a designer, but that's another story). The engine company offers customization services, but we don't want to give the job to them. Firstly, we are afraid that the developments we paid for will be used outside of our project (although this can be tried to be regulated legally, but it will be a chore to control it later), in addition, there are doubts that non-core workload (that is, not related to streaming sales of licenses and after-sales installation) will be interesting to them and beneficial to us.
The problem is the following: in our company there is no person with competence in Ruby. There are people in the company who understand something in programming (let's say they write a little in Python) and administration, but they are neither professional practicing web programmers nor administrators - they are rather managers, with some technical background.
Questions:
- where to look for Ruby programmers;
- how to check: what questions you need to ask a Ruby programmer to distinguish good from bad, what tasks to give, etc;
— how much to pay (is there any dependence on the region);
- it is better to take on a salary or pay on a piece-rate basis (or, for example, first on a piece-rate basis, and then on a salary);
- what else you need to think about and what you need to know in order to successfully hire a Ruby developer.

Answer 1

guys, you are a trading company, but seriously, why do you need to modify Internet engines.
don’t make such mistakes, you don’t have and will never have competence in this, you will never find competent specialists for yourself (at least for the reasons that a real professional programmer will never go to work in an online store of cowards)
you will have no one to set the right tasks, implement them correctly, and monitor the quality and deadlines, you will never assemble a competent team, just screw up the collective farm, and you will have some collective farmers developers jumping every six months, constantly running away from you.
it’s just that he himself looked at it from the outside, the circus and nothing more, really don’t poke your head into something where you are not at all competent.
order everything on a turnkey basis, no matter how much it costs, no matter what problems it brings, doing it inside yourself -> it will be more expensive and cause even more problems.
you just need to find a real company that will be ready for long-term cooperation and all your whims, and yes it is not cheap.
Initially, your approach is not correct, you first need to find a ready-made development team and then, together with them, develop a product for your needs, rather than buying a product and then modifying it on the side, since it will cost you more to modify someone else’s product than to develop your own, I guarantee you this , so now, unfortunately, you only have one way out -> this is to continue working with the same people who provided you with this development.

Answer 2

If you are on staff, then on headhunting sites
If you are on staff as a remote worker or just a temporary remote worker, then on freelance sites like fl.ru
If you don’t have a good rubyist, is there any point in asking questions that you don’t understand? Find a rubist nearby, let him conduct interviews, what to ask, he already knows.
A lot, ruby ​​is now one of the most expensive. There is no dependency, since most of the Rubists are in big cities, since there are no jobs for them in cities of less than a million. And with the current crisis, the Rubists actively rushed abroad.
This question should be asked to you.
Hire two of them, so as not to be left with nothing when one of them leaves.

Answer 3

You need a person (or two) who will be with you (at least) for the life of your project. This applies to any engine and product. And it may not be a person who lives near the office, but he (and) must be connected with you quite strongly financially.
Search - here, on freelance, or brainstorage, or there is a RoR group in Russian: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ror2ru
What to look for by skills? Everything is the same as an ordinary programmer. Sobriety of view, stability in work and experience.

Answer 4

I completely agree with Dima Kubitsky
Good programmers will have to pay hellishly to work in a non-core company, you understand, this will be a gap in their career and not a plus. But yes, the product will be finalized well.
The middle class is a different story. Here comes a person, you say "here is the product, we need to refine it," he will say that we need to understand the product, architecture, read all the docks. You will pay him a month of work purely for studying. In the second month, he will start trying, if it doesn’t work out, he will either leave right away or hold out the cat for the eggs and pay him for a couple more months.
And in both options, a person still understands that there are no such specialists in the company, it is difficult for the employer to control tasks and time, there is no code audit, which means you can do what you want, set the deadlines you want.