Hi,
in your experience, how hard it is to find a job as a junior developer who has some experience and loves working with Elixir? From my research, most of the Elixir jobs out there are for senior devs with several years of experience.
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This is due to survivor bias. The jobs that land on “public channels” are the jobs that the employer couldn’t fill with internal/local recruitment. If you want to find a junior position, then check out local meet-up (I assume that there is one) and ask there. It will be much easier to find it that way, especially if you have experience in another languages and you just want to “switch” to another language.
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I’ve met good amount of companies that were okay with training Elixir devs.
Just ask and don’t be shy. Write a good letter and just ask if they would be okay to train you on the job.
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I generally find, that the “requirements” in many job postings are just wish lists.
Personally, I have twice applied for positions, where I did not qualify for everything in the job post, but still got a job.
In one instance, they found me a good match for the company, but not for the particular position. During the application process, they found out that my skills would be valuable, although they had no job postings for that particular skill set.
In the other instance, the company and I seemed like a good match, and they accepted the fact, that I did not have the experience that they would have preferred.
Of course, I also applied for jobs that I didn’t get because they thought I was too inexperienced. You can’t win them all 
I completely agree with @dimitarvp, that reaching it out is the way forward. The worst thing that can happen is that they don’t respond.
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What about remote jobs? It’s very hard to find any Elixir jobs where I live so remote work would be perfect, even for a pay on a lower end. My goal is to learn and get experience. Would something like that be even possible? My other option is to relocate to find something better.
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Be positive and constructive, you have to be confident about yourself and your skills. Even if you know almost nothing - just be sure that you’ll learn all you need in process. Tell the truth and feel ok about possible rejection, that happens :-). And after all, just do your best in your promises(be positive, learn fast, code as good as you can for now).
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I was speaking explicitly for remote jobs btw. Same thing applies.
They could be a bit more comfortable if you share with them some completed Elixir exercises like those on exercism.io.
What do you consider lower end in your case? In yrly usd.
Just curious.
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Around 35-40k probably.
That is very low. I’m guessing you are not based in US? My company is hiring right now, open to training, but getting very few applicants from US, and unfortunately we can’t hire internationally right now.
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No, I’m in EU.
Out of curiosity, what’s the problem with hiring internationally? You require some timezone overlapping?
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I was under the impression that is was a tax thing, and I didn’t press. I might follow up though so we can increase the applicant pool.
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Timezones, taxes, employment laws and work permissions/trade embargos are the 4 major problems.
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I’ve been looking for Jr position as well and it’s been rare to see open positions on the wide.
Majority has been for senior, and even though I had a couple of interviews I know that a senior role for me is out of my league atm.
I’ve been able to find a freelance just recently and hopefully it will help finding something else later on.
Good luck on your search!
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If the jobs were open to outside the US, I don’t think the timezone would be a problem for employees on Latin America for example. A difference of 4 hours at most.
About the taxes. Maybe if you discount some of them in the final salary it could still be competitive outside the US. Given that some currencies are less valuable than dollar.
But I don’t know about employment laws or work permissions in this case. Could you talk about it more @NobbZ ?
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Taxes do not have anything to do with competivity inside or outside a region. It is about where they have to be paid and how they have to be calculated. Getting taxes right for the "“home country” is usually hard enough, though doing it correctly for a foreign country is especially if you perhaps need to pay just another tax consultant for that one employee who lives in a neigboring country.
Also, laws about how you have to employ and what you have to guarantee them differ between countries. So there might countries exist where you can fire someone without reason from between today and tomorrow, while in other countries there are laws that require you to hold an employee for at least 4 additional weeks to give them the opportunity to find something new. Also if they have to go to the court because of some disagreements, usually the employees legislature and location are assumed, which can cause additional costs for the employer.
Some of these problems are tried to get circumvented by hiring “contractors”, rather than employing someone, though beeing a self-employed contractor comes with additional problems of beeing self-employed.
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You hit that one right on the nail. My current employer had to consider all of these issues while hiring. They’re Europe-based and in the end decided on hiring from just within the EU. People outside their countries of operations are hired on as contractors (on paper, not how they’re actually treated) to ease most of the administrational pains. I’d say it works for them and it works for me.
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Yes, from what I know by talking to people who work for US companies, being employed is quite complicated, especially it there is no tax treaty between US and workers country so almost all of them work as contractors and that works fine. Contractor has to deal with taxes but that’s not so complicated once you get the hang of it. One person I know even started a company in Estonia to avoid many of those issues and works with an US employer through that company.
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Good analysis. From what I’ve seen, most programmers are just fine being hired as contractors so most of the reasons you enumerated are null and void in this case and it kind of turns into a “just in case” thing without a solidly explained reason. At one point it becomes cultural and not mandated by legislation.
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