Exploring Opportunities for Elixir Developers with Non-US Residency

Sadly there are not many opportunities for elixir jobs in general and now with crisis in europe, it is even worse, there are a lot of discussions on forum about this and it seems that this problem was persistent from long ago.

I’m also on that boat as someone with 3 years of Elixir experience who had to find a job in another stack. I’m already used to just accept the status quo following with what is available.

I also have two years of experience in PETAL stack and two years in MERN stack, sadly because of the current situation, I can’t find anything, I am also thinking about switching back to MERN until I found my next opportunity in Elixir.

Well the job market is bad for pretty much all the stacks right now. From what I hear from folks, some at least had interviews for Elixir based roles after getting hit with insta-auto-rejection at most other places.

Yeah, it would be such a relief if most US companies would allow remote work and same goes for UK companies as their markets are pretty similar where UK’s one is a bit more open for EU workers. However that’s not the only problem we have …

1. The Asia market may be bigger than we expect, however they use their own services, so most people in EU/US is not aware how the market looks like for them. Also I would not expect that they are so open for just English speaking developers (if so their offers would be also on our platforms).

2. The French market is really ermetic. Maybe there are open for remote work from other countries, but French is required no matter what skills you have.

3. The East Europe have terrible rates, they often offer a junior salary for seniors (comparing to West EU of course).

4. In other EU countries Elixir market was not so popular as in above and so if there is an offer then there is no surprise if they would require another language skills (like Brazil, Spanish etc.).

The only exception for above is Germany. They provide one of the best if not the best salaries in EU. They allow for remote work. German is often at most nice to have and rarely required. They have really healthy business, for example they are often really open to help for relocation.

Sadly for many people relocation to West EU is not a good option because of religion wars, NO GO zones, situation around yellow vests in French, EU attacks on UK’s market (after Brexit) and many other political decisions (like the situations related to covid coming directly to totalitarian regimes).

Honestly if countries like Japan would be actively supporting people like me who just want to work, be a part of their community, are willing to learn and relocate providing language courses, permanent visa and other help I would be the first one willing to go. Unfortunately currently people need to have some kind of contact with their local market, more or less know the Japanese and find a company that is willing to support relocation (not every one could even do that).

Speaking for Asia (or for India at least):

From an Elixir point of view we ourselves don’t have a very clear idea of the market here. The Elixir market is very, very, very new here and we’re just starting to see Elixir devs (I know for a fact that there is an Elixir team at Gojek, here in Bangalore).

I would suspect this to be true in places like Japan, Korea and China where they can afford to be snobby about language. In places like India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Singapore and maybe even Bangladesh everything happens in English. In India for example, there are just far too many local languages that are spoken and picking one as a lingua franca will only result in fewer candidates and controversy. So, the language for work is English. I’m not too sure about Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines, but I guess in IT everything happens in English simply because selling your product (i.e. to foreigners) and creating your product (i.e. reading docs, using forums, practically interacting with a software community etc) needs English at the bare minimum. I for one haven’t seen any Thai docs for Elixir, and I don’t think there will ever be any substantial number of them.

The actual problem at hand is very different. It’s not linguistic but rather economic. The salaries in Asia just can’t compete with what is expected in developed nations like the US/EU/UK etc. For one the cost living is much lower over here. A dozen eggs costs INR 60 (which is about 73 cents) in Bangalore (which is an expensive city by indian standards). Comparing that what I least heard about NYC which is about USD 5.35 per dozen. That’s almost sevenfold! What can pay for a very comfortable life here in Asia isn’t much in the US/EU where the cost of living is at another scale. That’s why you don’t see Asian jobs in your job portals.

However from an APAC point of view, there are 3 English speaking nations that are an exception to this phenomenon: Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand. The problem with these places is that they are just too far away from rest of the developed world (i.e. US East Coast and EU), so timezones become an issue. I guess US West Coast could work with AUS or NZ, but that is eliminated cause we’re speaking for people with Non-US Residency. This just might be possible for people living in Mexico and South America (i.e. Chile, Peru but probably not Brazil) but timezone-wise I expect it to be similar to collaborating from US East Coast.

I mean Asia-specific apps like Line in Japan.

snobby may be France as they were empire and they expect everyone to use French. Especially Japan is really a local market with English used only for tourism. China on one side have a nationalism propaganda (they want to become a big player like they do in their history), but on the other side they are producers, so I expect a big number of people in this branch to use many languages.

i.e. post colonial countries or countries focused on transport. btw. Isn’t Pakistan going more to China in general since lots of investments in transport to sea and ports? As above mostly I was talking about strong local markets.

Taiwan is “traditional China”, so they use same/similar language, but because of factories they may know English pretty well.

Malaysia and Philippines (see street view) are rather open to English. A “small Asia” (except Singapore) most probably focus on their own languages and I guess there are more interested in China, because of export from it.

If there is a really strong local market then you may find lots of translations. I’m sure about Chinese and most probably there are also Japanese.

I would say it depend on country. As far as I know in Japan a good month for one person costs around 400k JPY which is above 2.6k EUR. Just for sure I’m talking about net salary. In countries like Romania especially before covid even 600 EUR (around minimum salary now) for 2 people should be enough. Of course it’s not a money for everyday restaurant, but it’s already a good life standard.

Depends on type of work. I did not had any problem working with text chat only. Working remotely with elastic hours have no issues in this place at all.

You’re likely confusing Taiwan and Thailand. I lived in Taiwan for eight years, but left about a decade ago and haven’t spent much time there since. Young people know English, but are generally shy about speaking it because they don’t get much opportunity to practice, and are mostly reading/writing it. But I expect in the software arena, it would be fine especially as most communication would be asynchronous.

But salaries in Taiwan are very low for graduates, with a lot of graduate unemployment. (A lot of Taiwan graduates moved to China for higher salaries, but now China is also suffering from high-unemployment amongst graduates that will likely push salaries lower.) And, without looking up labour laws, I don’t think Taiwan companies would get away with the 9-9-6 culture of 72-hour work weeks that are common in China.

For anyone wanting to work in tech in Taiwan, the government introduced a very flexible visa program in 2018. To quality, software engineers need to be on a current monthly salary of NT$160,000 (currently US$5,200) or qualify under one of 12 other conditions. It’s very flexible in that you can bring your wife and kids, work for any company (in or outside Taiwan), and get permanent residency after three years.

Getting back to the main subject, I’d be surprised to find companies in Taiwan using Elixir. And if they existed, they would likely be paying much lower salaries than you would expect. But Taiwan has great quality of life with amazing food, lots of culture, and great public transportation. And, yes, it’s fair to argue that Taiwan has preserved more of traditional Chinese culture, since it didn’t reset itself in 1966.

right, thanks - I have updated my comment

Yeah, I guess it looks similar in other Asian countries

Same in Poland. People after medicine usually have only one way … UK.

I wonder what conditions they have. It’s not like that I can come any time and say that I want to create my own LLC company or something like that and work for clients in many countries, do I?

It’s not so simple. If some company needs Elixir and there are not much developers, the actual salaries may be higher than in more popular languages. In general there are 2 conditions. Firstly company is willing to pay. Secondly you can prove your work is worth it. Also if you are already there on permanent visa then what’s stopping you from working remotely with companies around the world?

It actually sounds very flexible. I read elsewhere that it’s smoother if you can show that recent monthly pay stub of the equivalent of US$5,200, rather than proving you have special skills, etc. I’d suggest signing up for something like Xolo Go so that you can bill multiple clients if you want to do consultancy work in many countries from Taiwan.