I have no particular expertise in the matter. However in the process of trying to find people who can become productive as quickly as possible “wasting” time trying to find a reasonable close match to the current requirements can delay work starting. Furthermore over time business needs change anyway so people who can adapt are preferable anyway.
Now I’ve come across anecdotes of people not wanting to invest any time in learning Erlang because they were concerned that they marketability might suffer. I don’t think Elixir has the same problem - I would imagine it’s much easier to find people willing to learn and work with Elixir than to find people with “commercial Elixir experience”. The real challenge is identifying “good programmers”.
FYI:
if I learned more Node.js or dived deeper into html/css would provide a backup for me so that there would be a larger pool of potential employers?
At the risk of being trite and unhelpful: Skills are good, yes. But:
- What are the skills that employers value where you are or where you want to be.
- Over the long haul you have to provide value to others in a way that you can find rewarding. (In the near and short term there are always less than perfect compromises to be made as there are always bills to be paid - but keep an eye on the prize).
Lets say your prize is to be an “Elixir developer” - but you can’t connect with that right now:
For example, is there a
- RoR shop
- Node.js shop
- Python shop (example)
that may need to scale soon? Can you connect with one of them? Now in the end they may decide to adopt Go instead but at least it buys you some time for that Elixir job to show up somewhere else.
our mission statement is to help artists so I would like to think, NO, i would WANT to promote a culture where engineers were allowed to pursue their ART.
Now if this is your prize things are a bit more challenging. In my experience software development jobs don’t often leave you much time to do your “own thing” - in fact often it is expected to make sacrifices at “crunch time” - which can happen far more often than most people like.
So obviously right now you are trying to make a go of it - but if that doesn’t work out are there any businesses that operate at the fringe of your vision and connect with one of them and help them “automate” something?
