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I was querying indeed.com/salary to investigate general market trends. When comparing ruby on rails with drupal, you would observe a substantial difference between these two.

I'm not sure if the data on indeed.com is reliable or not but I'd appreciate your comments if you have ever tried both rails and drupal.

Actually I am a .net developer considering an alternative to my asp.net mvc skills and I like to learn some non-microsoft web programming skills as well.

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So, are you looking to compare jobs using Rails vs. jobs using Drupal, or are you looking for other aspects in the comparison? Could you be more specific? – Martijn Pieters Nov 9 '12 at 8:20
I intended to ask for comparison on job market. specifically in the united states and canada. – omid.n Nov 9 '12 at 12:22
Although RoR and Drupal have the same end goal of creating websites, they are two different animals. RoR is going to be similar to ASP.NET MVC whereas Drupal is a CMS designed to facilitate creating websites via the front-end (i.e. minimal programming). Obviously you can program custom stuff in Drupal but personally I find Drupal code extremely unintuitive to work with. Forget about salary, I think you would find much more programming joy with RoR if those are your two options. If you want the PHP equivalent of ASP.NET MVC check out Yii Framework. – User Nov 10 '12 at 20:16

closed as not a real question by gnat, thorsten müller, ChrisF♦ Nov 9 '12 at 9:04

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I think it would be more fair to compare rails to php, as you are unlikely to find as many specifically drupal jobs as you are generic php jobs that might touch on drupal, among others. Coming from a .net (well, even earlier, actually) background, myself, I can assure you that writing ruby/rails is far more pleasurable than the best piece of .net I have ever worked with. It is a bit of a learning curve, to be sure, but well worth the time investment. At my job, we are actually required to know .net, php, and ruby, among others, you can't really know too much. With that being said, salaries for all of these technologies vary widely from region to region, as well as by developer skill and many other factors. In my area, I think I could probably make the most money doing exclusively .net, despite the shortage of rails developers (unless, perhaps, by telecommuting). I would prefer to make a little less, and continue to do what I enjoy. Also, you may be able to use your .net experience to your advantage. If you find a good shop that uses .net, as well as other desirable technologies, maybe you can get on there and learn on the job, maybe paired up with an expert in the field. I would start learning something now, and start sending out resumes, at the same time. You'll never know what your environment is like until you test it...

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One other thing... A really good reason to switch, other that the language differences, is the community. Check out things like guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html and apidock.com/rails. Great docs like that doesn't even exist in .net. Also stuff like ruby-toolbox.com - to do half of that in .net, you need to buy some overpriced proprietary component from some weird company... – Brad Werth Nov 9 '12 at 7:42
thank's a lot brad. I think I'm going to give rails a ride. I guess I will like it and your comments were awesome bye the way. – omid.n Nov 9 '12 at 7:44
Right on, thanks, and good luck. If you are not from a MVC background, there will be things that seem very hard/confusing. It can be frustrating, but do try to stick with it until it clicks, you will be very glad you did... – Brad Werth Nov 9 '12 at 7:46

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