Being from San Diego, it appears the writer has more than one thing in common with Ron Burgundy:
"Anyways, I have been quite busy preparing courses for classes I gave to a bunch a great Engineers at one of the Fortune 100 companies based in San Diego. I was also planning my big vacation trip to Europe and wrapping up few projects."
Translates to:
"I don't know how to put this but I'm kind of a big deal. People know me. I'm very important. I have many leather-bound books and my apartment smells of rich mahogany."
This is a theme I'm hearing from a number of directions these days: namely, that Rails has (deservedly) attracted a lot of attention for web development, and tempted a lot of people from the PHP and Java camps into doing Ruby, but hasn't produced nearly as large a crop of expert Ruby developers as one might hope.
The basic fact is that a year or two of Rails development experience doesn't make you a good architect, systems programmer, or database administrator. Good back-end engineers are much rarer, and should command a premium, if only because such knowledge really does only come from years of hard-earned experience.
Oh, I dunno. I think you can get more done with a small group of super-smart guys the you could with a big group of mediocre ones (isn't that already an axiom?)
I think the client in this story tried to staff up the way a big waterfall or java project typically scales up: hire as many cogs as you can and give them each a little module to work on. In essence, they want a big group of mediocre developers.
A bummer, but perhaps a failing of the consultant. With any adoption of new technology or process, you have to prep the client for uncomfortable changes. Like paying more to fewer developers, or starting work without a 300 line mpp project plan, or whatever.
Sometimes in our roles as consultants, that's the most important job.
[...] you just need to get one or two great ruby guys (who will probably cost you a lot) and find a bunch of smart people to train. You'll end up with an awesome team of scalable rubyists ;)
"Anyways, I have been quite busy preparing courses for classes I gave to a bunch a great Engineers at one of the Fortune 100 companies based in San Diego. I was also planning my big vacation trip to Europe and wrapping up few projects."
Translates to:
"I don't know how to put this but I'm kind of a big deal. People know me. I'm very important. I have many leather-bound books and my apartment smells of rich mahogany."