Controversial and potentially unethical advice follows.

For me the answer was straightforward – I never did admit to the first 1-2 companies where I worked with Elixir that I had no extensive professional experience with it; I used it at my jobs before my first Elixir job to rewrite several services and to gain confidence in my practical skills (and that was behind my manager’s back).

After that I just answered vaguely “yep, I used it a few times to great success when rewriting parts of a legacy Rails system, and I am looking forward to use it more” and boom, I had my first Elixir job.

People are skeptical about lack of previous professional experience in any area but the senior programmers know that after you gain a certain amount of practice you can then become good at anything in a very short time. Which is what I did with Elixir.

So again, some people might find this advice unethical but as the Americans say: “don’t hate the player, hate the game”. Which means: after I found out what didn’t work and what worked I was able to bluff my way to Elixir jobs and do a pretty awesome job there.

Put your foot at the door by any means necessary. Then prove yourself. As long as you’re not scamming people and are actually pulling your weight and bring value to your employer / customer then both sides have won.

I think I got lucky
I was hired in a company to re-implement their core system. At the time I was researching Go and Elixir, before going there. This company was about online advertisement (banners and such).
I spent a month or two on R&D, including Go and Elixir.
Finally, we settled down on Elixir, due to being able to handle concurrent large number of connections ,with small data transfer in each, more easily. Also it provided better soft real-time guarantees.

I’m a freelancer, and got my first paid Elixir gig through a consulting shop I often work through. I’d made quite a bit of noise about my enthusiasm for Elixir with them, and even organized a meetup in my city. So when there was a sudden need for an experienced developer to work in a client project, I was asked to help out. I was able to hit the ground running, no trouble, and charging my usual rate.

I suggest looking into networking as a way to help out with migration to professional elixir work. Attend (or organize) meetups, maybe give a talk or two, get to know other Elixir enthusiasts in the area. That way, when their company needs new developers, it’s very likely they’ll give you a call.

As for why they should pay you the senior developer rates even though you haven’t worked professionally with Elixir before? Elixir is only one part of the tech stack. Let’s take a web development project that is working with Elixir, Phoenix, PostgreSQL, Docker, Nginx, JavaScript ecosystem and so on. Of course, they also use ubiquitous technologies that are usually not even mentioned when looking for developers: HTTP, TCP/IP, DNS, HTML, CSS and so on. Odds are, if you’ve been working with web development before, you already have experience with a lot of that.

In addition, you have experience in aspects of work that are as important as programming skill itself, such as the ability to communicate clearly, clarify requirements, and confidence to push back and suggest alternatives when you can think of a better way. All this experience, both technological and “soft skills”, is worth a lot in terms of development speed and quality, and is therefore a good reason to pay you well. Lacking professional experience in some parts of the stack is not that important, especially when you have the personal enthusiasm to study and practice just those parts on your own. As developers, we have to learn new technologies for new projects all the time anyway.

For interviews, I believe it’s important to internalize the way of thinking I outlined above, and not sell yourself short. It’s easier to convince others of your value if you’re convinced of it yourself.