Is the Economic Crisis Having an Effect on Programmers?

Like the rest of the nation, I've been paying close attention to the latest developments with the stock market and the economic bailout plan. As companies expand, as they do in a healthy economy, they often need programmers to help them build websites and internal applications. In the past few years, a lot of big companies have begun to use Ruby on Rails as a platform. So I started thinking about how this economic downturn might affect Ruby developers.

I discovered that a number of really high-profile companies--including some financial giants--are using Ruby on Rails or, at the very least, have RoR developers on staff. A few of the ones that jumped out at me were JPMorgan Chase & Co., CashNetUSA, American Express Business Travel (which is using cubeless internally) and Dow Jones itself (which uses RoR for WSJ.com).

The number of big-name corporations using Ruby is far too great to list here. Luckily, I don't have to since Working with Rails has a pretty comprehensive list already compiled. If nothing else, the list will satisfy your curiosity as to who's using RoR.

What it won't do, is satisfy your curiosity as to where the IT world stands in this economic crisis. I do have some good news in that regard. According to the U.S. Department of Labor's preliminary statistics for last month, the 4.8% unemployment rate in the IT world is over 1% lower than the national average (6.1%). It may not sound like much, but 1% of the U.S. population is nothing to sneeze at!