I am an IT student and I tend to think about variety of languages and its future a lot - lastly after a year of Rails learning I noticed Elixir and Phoenix and fell in love with it - I love the feel and look of both, and I started to think if it is worth to dive into these technologies deeper, because I am not sure how job market looks there (actually I do a bit, and I am afraid it is rather in poor state at this moment). Do You think It will become a valid career option in the future (and how much would It take to become viable option)? Or maybe It is already? It may be worth mentioning that I am from Poland and I strongly doubt that these technologies will come there in any near future, but I consider moving abroad after finishing university (2 years to go).
Lastly I want to apologize for any grammar mistakes (feel free to point out these!), I am still learning.
In my region opportunities for Elixir are rare (and this is optimistic!) while one choose among some corporations which use erlang. But it is hard to get into them, I applied to every single one of them, but had no luck, got the last reply today and again, they denied 
In the elixir slack channel for jobs is a position posted about once a week, but about 99% of them are USA only, not accepting remote from outside.
Also there is this mailing newsletter, which I forgot the name of, which has a list of open jobs every week, and this list seems to grow with every issue of the newsletter. Again, most of them seem to be USA.
Of course due to the fact that I’m still studying as well makes it hard to find a job…
I think good developers - of any language - will always be in demand.
Having said that, if you are just starting out as a developer you may want to look at one of the more popular languages to begin with. In time tho, Elixir is going to be everywhere because it offers features -and- benefits that almost no other language does …so may be learn it in your spare time so you are prepared 
You mean Elixir Radar 
They usually send 3 or 4 job offers each week but they’re usually the same each week
The Job market is currently a bit bleak and its probably not a language you should learn just to get a job however, its still worth learning because it will make you a better overall programmer especially with Javascript and you will be quite ahead when the market picks up kind of like Ruby was in 90s.
About the mailing newsletter, is Elixir Radar, I think. You can subscribe to it here: http://plataformatec.com.br/elixir-radar
I agree with the others here, that focusing on something else would probably get you a job sooner. However, there is hope! The company I work for has recently switched to Phoenix instead of Rails for all new projects, and we aren’t looking back.
I think within a couple years, it will be very possible to get Elixir jobs.
We’re dipping our toes in the water with Elixir at NoReadInk. Odds are good that we’ll get it into production soon now.
Is that with Elm on the front-end @JEG2? We’d love for you to share any insights about working with them together if you have any (we have an Elm-Phoenix wiki here too).
Is that with Elm on the front-end @JEG2?
Yeah, I’m pretty sure we’re the largest user of Elm. Evan Czaplicki, the creator of Elm, works for us now.
We’d love for you to share any insights about working with them together if you have any (we have an Elm-Phoenix wiki here too).
We haven’t done a lot with them together, yet. I do know we’ve played some with serializing Elm’s signal graph for Phoenix. I think we have a blog post about that coming pretty soon.
But yeah, I’ll share when there’s more progress to report.
If it makes you feel any better, I study Computer Sciene at the University of Oslo.
The community around Elixir here is non existant. There’s more of a general community to functional programming here, I would say the largest communities here are Scala and F. The reason is due to the job market, which is mostly consultant jobs for the public government sector (Java/C#).
What you can do is to actually use Elixir and get others at your school or community interested.
Example:
1.I am developing a Facebook Messenger bot for my university. The project is still under development, and solves two of the largest issues I have: Figuring out what food is being served and when does the gym close today.
I could just developed this for myself and just had some hooks with Twilio, which then send me an SMS. But this is limiting, others would probably love to have something like this.
The project is available on Github and hopefully I can get some students at my Computer Sciene department interested and help develop new features.
2.Help the community out, see if there’s any libraries you could develop or help out with. I am working on a Esports startup that requires some integration with other services/APIs. I found a wrapper to the League of Legends API in Elixir. I decided to help the solo developer, as it is missing some features and unit tests.
What you learn in school, is what you learn in school. It’s way more important to show that you have the fundamentals and theory down, but also the projects to prove that you are capable of executing.
As far as job prospects in Elixir, it will come with time. What you can do is little by little start learning the fundamentals of Erlang, get comfortable with OTP and how to design with OTP.
That’s my opinion
Cheers friend!
Elixir is a new language and while it’s built on stable and proven tech, it’s still new and it’s in a different paradigm than the norm. It’ll take some time for companies to hear about and want to use it. Also, not many rewrite their backends very often. It took Ruby/Rails, Node, etc. some time to get attention, so just be patient. And remember, PHP and Java jobs still dwarf Rails and Node jobs combined.
There are small a handfull of us in the oslo area. Organizing meetups in drammen at the moment.
Awesome!
I do know there’s a larger FP meet-up group, but haven’t seen any Elixir specific. Are you guys in the slack or IRC group?
There’s me and another one in the Elixir Slack group, translating the elixir-school lectures to Norwegian.
The jobs at the moment are few and concentrated in US but I think it will be changing fairly rapidly. Elixir has tangible biz benefits that are easy to sell.
Longtime lurker, first time poster – I wanted to bump this thread and maybe get some advice.
Has the job market changed much in the last 9 months or so? Is it growing as much as people were expecting? What are others’ thoughts?
I’m a self-taught developer looking for my first real programming job. I started learning Ruby/Rails about 3.5 years ago and picked up Elixir 2 years ago and haven’t really looked back.
I’ve gone ahead and read / worked through most of the Elixir books that exist and a handful of the Erlang books. I just finished the recent FutureLearn/University of Kent FP in Erlang course and plan to take the followup course in Concurrent Programming in Erlang. The BEAM is inspiring, plus the languages themselves and their accompanying philosophies are so pleasant.
I have gotten more active in the community, attending Elixir Conf in Orlando this last year on my own dime and co-founded the Elixir meetup group in Houston, Texas in September. Additionally I’m contributing to a couple open source libraries on Github, with full test coverage.
Moving to Denver in the summer, I am starting to look more seriously at switching careers. I recognize that few opportunities exist, but the companies I have spoken to and the job postings I find are essentially for senior developers and are allergic to juniors. It’s getting difficult finding new ways to differentiate myself as an attractive junior/entry level candidate. I apologize for going into so much personal detail, but it’s to demonstrate that I’m invested in this and following a lot of standard advice.
Do entry level Erlang jobs even exist? Would it be better to instead enroll in a graduate program, focus on distributed systems and wait for the industry as a whole to adopt more BEAM-based technologies?
I wonder about the health of the industry as a whole if companies don’t seem to want to accept the risk of training junior developers and go on to complain about a dearth in talent. Perhaps junior roles are just something better attained through networking than the application process, and it’s something I will have to do after moving.
At any rate, I’m thankful that this community exists and is slowly dragging the world into a better future.
I posted this in another thread but will post it again here:
This, to me at least, tells me that companies and startups are beginning to take Elixir very seriously - because they are willing to pay a premium for developers.
All the hard work of the core team, community members, early adopters and consultancies investing in Elixir, is, Imo, on track and now beginning to pay off. There is only one thing missing - a killer app. Once we get an Elixir app that is in the top 10 or 20 we will hit mass-market very quickly. It’s one of the reasons I continue to evaluate the forum and make sure we are equipped to deal with a surge.
Note I said once we get a killer app, rather than if we get one - I believe it is only a matter of time 
Keep doing what you are doing (thanks!) and continue to pursue what you feel is right or where the smart money’s at. That is the only advice I can give.
With regards to entry level Erlang jobs, I’m sure they have seen a surge in interest since WhatsApp’s dev blogs 
It’s really hard to say. IMO if you want a more mainstream language with job opportunities that will let you get “close” in principle to a lot of what you do with Elixir, it’s worth looking at Go. There are times when it makes me want to poke my eyes out but other times when I really appreciate it compared to other options. It’s not exactly the same and there’s plenty in Elixir/Erlang that you’ll never be able to do with Go but it’s probably the “next best option”.
There are more and more companies making the switch. I saw Teachers Pay Teachers in NYC is switching their entire stack to Elixir.
@AstonJ That chart is really helpful. It’s great to see that Elixir is gaining momentum, and I appreciate the encouragement. I’m really ready for the big Elixir splash.
@brightball I looked at Go in the past, but I think we both agree how much more of a joy and a boon Elixir/Erlang can be. It’s a good thought though for the similarities in (some) uses.
Thanks for the replies! I’m going to hang in there. It would just be really nice to not work in the Rails or Node mines if I can avoid it. Once you start working with Elixir/Erlang, it’s unpleasant to go back to anything else.
I’m seeing people say that more and more often
I would usually suggest working on your own start-up on the side (make your own path) but I realise that can be quite a challenge. I have an idea that might be of helpful to people in a similar situation as yourself - let me think more about it and if I think it’s worth doing I will post about it
