Elixir career advice, training and certification

• For tips on how to learn/improve at Elixir take a look at our #learning-questions-discussions:learning-questions section as there are quite a few threads where people suggest various paths

• 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.

No offence taken but which advice in particular and what makes you certain it is ineffective?

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.

It seems really hard to find Elixir jobs unless you really have lots of experience.

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.