Hi all, so I’m trying to get together a training plan for this year. I’m a software engineer with a several years of experience in the field but it’s difficult to land an Elixir job. I’ve been studying/working with Elixir intermittently these last 2 years. Besides that, at my current work I’ve the opportunity to work with production Elixir a couple of times, but my overall experience isn’t more than a year and a half.
What I did so far:
Read the complete Elixir documentation
Read Learn Functional Programming with Elixir
Read Elixir in Action
Read Phoenix in Action
Worked 6 months in a production blockchain related Elixir project
So taking this into account, what steps do you think I can follow to land a job in Elixir? Maybe a formal training? I came across with https://learn-elixir.dev and seems a good idea, but 500 dollar per month is close to impossible to pay for me (I’m not in the USA).
Another idea is to take the certification exams from https://www.erlang-solutions.com/elixir-certification. I’m not sure about how to prepare for this, what to learn and what to practice, and the webpage has very little information about this, I’d be very sad to waste 300 euros to get nothing. Also I’m not really sure if companies actually attach importance to this.
For certification, @ErlangSolutions has been around for almost as long as Erlang itself, so in the BEAM world there’s probably nothing that comes close in terms of certification credibility
For career advice, again there are quite a few threads where people offer tips so its worth browsing the forum, here’s some of what I’ve previously posted myself:
Ultimately, if a company is not looking for a very highly sought after skill-set or individual (in other words where it is incredibly hard to find someone with those skills) then aside from the usual ascertaining of how competent you might be as a developer they’ll be looking at things like how you might fit in with their team, their culture, whether you share the same work ethic etc.
Remember, people generally hire people - if you want to get hired, ask yourself what would make you an attractive proposition, with that in mind you can’t go far wrong imo
Hi Aston! Sorry if I was repetitive. I’ve read some of these threads, but personally I’d been rejected on some interviews for having just 1 year of Elixir experience. So I thought about formal training or certification as a way to have a stronger resume. Maybe like someone said in the forum, if the company doesn’t value the prior not-Elixir experience it’s a red flag that it’s not a good place anyways. Beside that, I’m trying to improve as much as I can my interview skills, I know prep takes time and can be crucial.
No worries Pablo, I don’t think we’ve had many threads about certification so I’m sure others will find this thread useful as well
Often companies will mention experience as to why a candidate wasn’t successful, eg “We took someone on who just had a bit more experience than you” but in reality, unless there is a tangible gap in experience then it may just boil down to this:
The best advice I would offer here is pretty much the same advice I would offer to any person interested in becoming the best possible version of themselves - introspect and reflect. You can literally mould yourself into the person you want to be, so if you want to become a developer that is too good to miss, then look at what might help you do that and work towards it.
That’s how I approach things anyway, perhaps others will have different advice
Don’t worry about that, I have 6+ years of elixir experience and I usually get rejected in 90% of cases, for one stupid reason or another. To point out how low the stupid bar is, I was once rejected after I was given a task that involves solving a problem with a state machine, the decline reason was that I used gen_statem (which is a standard library that part of OTP), to make it clear there was never a mention about usage of libraries, especially the standard ones.
If you are looking for improving your skills, contributing to OSS or building something that solves a real-world problerm you could use is more effective. I would say, without any offence, that @AstonJ advices are innefective, especially in the context of being hired remotely for a company you have no idea about, with the exception of:
This one is right on the point. If you can manage to get acquainted with folk from the ecosystem, there is a good chance that someone might be willing to hire you if you managed to make a good impression on them. I would start by trying to find local elixir developers from your country, meet up with them and keep in touch, as remotely this is extremely hard to do.
As someone who chose this path, I can tell you that it is extremely hard and you will have to invest a lot of hours before you see any amount of progress. The elixir job market is extremely competitive and a lot of times you are competing against guys like me or more experienced. If I could go back in time, I would have used the time I’ve spent to improve my interview skills to meet and talk with people, as that is a much easier entrance than cold applying for jobs.
One more advice is to contact not only other elixir developers but agencies too. Agencies are very interested in having your profile in their backpocket, as their clients are sometimes hiring in bulk and they need more people than they have to fill that demand.
The only thing is to keep in mind with this is that there is no guarantee when and if you will be contacted, but it doesn’t hurt to do anyway.
I think I’ve worded it wrong, the only advice I’m not really keen on is to read a lot of books, you tend to lose pragmatism if you don’t build stuff, but this is more in the long run, for juniors it might be pretty useful.
What I wanted to point out is that the idea of proving your usefulness/competency is not effective, as every damn company/hiring person has their random metric they think it’s important and man, sometimes it’s so random you might think they live in their own universe. This obviously is completely different if you have connections that can directly vouch for you, but in the world of remote work and random companies you have access as a junior, making true connections is not something that happens often.
If you allow me, I’d like to share my story, maybe it will bring you some relief.
Today, I received feedback on a code interview I did for a startup in the US. The test was ridiculously simple: I had to build a URL shortening system. During the interview, I couldn’t use my preferred setup and had to improvise in VSCode without AI-powered autocomplete. The result? I ran out of time because I couldn’t type everything, even though I managed to complete the core logic, making it clear that I knew what I was doing. However, that wasn’t enough to get the job.
An important detail: before the interview, I was never informed that I couldn’t use AI to complete the code, nor that I would have to use a setup I wasn’t familiar with.
I’ve been working with Elixir daily since 2019. I’ve built two entire applications from scratch: an e-commerce platform for the food service industry and a budgeting system for engineering companies with extremely complex calculations. I’ve contributed bug fixes to the LiveView core and released two Elixir libraries, one of them has a decent number of stars on GitHub and positive feedback.
It’s really frustrating to realize that none of this was taken into consideration and that the test was actually evaluating my typing speed. After this experience, I feel like quitting job applications altogether and becoming an indie hacker.
Rest assured, the problem is not you. The problem is that hiring processes are broken. CTOs don’t know what they want from candidates.
having worked at multiple elixir startups i can say as far as exp devs, umm no. the vast maj of elixir devs ive worked with were multi lang programmers, transferring their skillset and patterns from one lang to the other. sometimes good often times bad, its really about who you know, lots of startups have the idea ill just hire a friend of a friend, the results u can see, i too like d4no0 have been overlooked by corps using built in otp libs and have been rejected due to the “team” not understanding basic stuff.
Thank you all, for your replies, are really helpful and at the same time depressing lol. I also feel that the interview processes are broken. I once took and interview where I had a week to develop a real life app with the tech of my preference, and then a second interview to explain it and go through it. This approach felt more natural and the interviewers could actually see how a person works. Having to code in a strange setup with interviewers watching you or a big clock going down it’s really stressful and I failed when I had to do it. I guess we could “hack” the process practicing exercises constantly to be in touch with the language, but it’s really discouraging.
I like the idea of trying to make contact with people around me like @D4no0 said, but finding Elixir developers it’s not so easy here in Argentina, will try though.
And also I keep thinking how to level up my game professionally. If taking a more broad path about software engineering/design/architecture or trying to dive deep on advanced Elixir topics, but that is diverging for my original question.
The situation is similar in Chile regarding the availability of Elixir jobs. But there are plenty of options if you look in the right place. I’m sure you could find something in some hot markets like USA, Germany and Japan.
Your experience is symptomatic of a larger problem with the interviewing practice in our industry. Our body of work does not count as we know it should. The level of dedication to build something and offer it to the public is severely undervalued. Do I have a solution? Nope! Just an observation. Hang in there and don’t give up. The right opportunity is on the way.
The approach you described here reflects my best interviewing experience to date. I even went as far as creating a video walkthrough to explain my solution.
unfortunately, I don’t have any advice. I would like to double your request and to rise it:
I (5 YoE in Elixir) would happily pay for assessment and career advice, if such a thing would be available.
Software engineer hiring process is absurdly broken in general across the whole sector. The upheaval that the industry is going through due to AI technology and tooling simply makes it worse. I don’t know what the solution is, but every time I see a company doing multiple rounds of coding interviews with arbitrary rules and making candidates jump through hoops and then rejecting them due to completely subjective and silly reasons, I get profoundly depressed. We all deserve better.
This hype will most probably die out in a few years. Most of the companies that claim that they got a major increase in efficiency and can afford to cut staff, had broken processes to begin with, they think that they can shove all their technical debt and problems under a rug using these chatbots.
The actual negative that impacts hiring a lot are the generative models. I’ve observed about 2 years ago a explosion on applications for almost all development positions. From what I understood from a agency, most of those applications were fake, most likely some companies were testing out their models to see how well they are received.
I agree with this, but at the same time we, the developers, are partly at fault for it getting to this sad state. We should have said long ago no to these primitive practices created by big corporations that were only interested in hoarding talent back in the day.
I personally decline to proceed instantly any offers that include:
unpaid home assignments that are longer than 2-3 hours;
live coding sessions in any format;
positions with no salary range and unclear responsibilities;
more than 2-3 rounds of interviews.
If we are to kill these outdated interview practices, we have to say no time and time again to companies and recruiters that still blindly follow these practices, that is the only way this process will change. Instead of bragging about solving leetcode algorithms, we should talk about good workplace conditions and encourage good development practices.
One of the biggest scams in the latest years. They are convenient scapegoat positions to deceive investors that the companies are (1) growing and (2) are with the times. It’s mostly PR.
Sure some art-creation companies do legitimately need GenAI. But comparing the several branches of the economy that might truly need GenAI with the actual job postings, the ratio is probably 1:100… in the best-case scenario. Could easily be 1:50000.
This is the tragedy of late-stage capitalism. Times get harder and harder and people compromise. Then the previous-bad becomes the new-normal. Really sad to watch it unfold in real time. Breaks my heart.
