Hiring Elixir programmers vs looking for a job as an Elixir programmer?

Questions / Help
23

My current perception:

  • Your mainstream business prefers to have a cheap and ready resource pool to hire from. To some decision makers the difference between programming languages isn’t apparent. And in the short term programming languages are just a tool - but not choosing the right tool for the job can have long term consequences. I think the most relevant anecdote is Paul Graham’s Beating the Averages (Y Store now C++, Why was Yahoo! Stores rewritten in C++/Perl from Lisp?). Lisp enabled Graham to manage Viaweb with minimal resources because he had the right resources (including himself). Yahoo converted it - they already had C++/Perl expertise and knew how to hire for it.

  • People need to make a living. If they decide to go into software development (the money can be good) they want to be as marketable as possible. So they focus on skills that have the most job openings (i.e. skills that businesses want to have in cheap and ready supply).

  • Education systems bow to the pressure of demand from both the employers and the prospective employees. Make them “productive”/“marketable” with the least amount of fuss, as they do have their business/lives to get on with. MIT’s first programming course was once based on SICP with Scheme - seems now Python has made inroads.

  • If you view coding as “just your job” the one language mentality can be pretty attractive. This continues to feed the investment in established languages like C#, Java, Python because by now there already is a humongous established codebase that needs maintaining. I also suspect that “one language” is the primary driver behind isomorphic JavaScript, i.e. the adoption of Node.js as a server-side technology.

  • Edit: In some organizations “successful” software developers are expected to move into management. This can lead to a situation where the people doing the work haven’t had much time to flesh out their skill sets, while the people managing them aren’t keeping up with the options.

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24

Elixir is so relatively new you’re going to have an incredibly hard time finding a “real elixir role”, whatever that means.

25

Tell that to my agent who has a hard time filling Elixir roles. The issue isn’t that there aren’t enough Elixir roles. The problem is there aren’t enough Elixir devs who aren’t really Ruby devs dabbling in Elixir / Phoenix.

26

Yes and no. For the server, yes, definitely. I’ve starting one such project myself. For the client, no. In blockchain, it’s all about the race to compute, so something like Go or C would be better for that.

As an example, I wrote a complete RFC5766 TURN server in Elixir in three weeks with full tests and peer client. Normally, such an endeavour would take months.

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27

And this is why it would sound fun to take a job as an Elixir dev elsewhere, I came from the C/C++/Erlang side of things so that sounds to me like it is more interesting work (like Discord level interesting, instead of simple web work). ^.^

Yeah the BEAM VM is SO fantastic for binary IO work (that’s what it was really designed for after all). :slight_smile:

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