How has knowing Elixir changed your employment possibilities?

When I first started looking for a job in Elixir, it was limiting because I was looking for companies in my city who had Elixir opportunities. However, as soon as I opened up my search to remote opportunities, I had a greater range of job opportunities than I could have ever imagined. After joining my current gig for Elixir, I had the chance to engage with the Elixir community further, and talked to dozens of companies about their thoughts on hiring with Elixir. A strong majority of them said that hiring in Elixir gave them a distinct competitive advantage when looking for passionate devs. Their candidate pools were stronger, and they felt great about their hiring decisions.

I’ve had a lot of difficulty finding any fulltime opportunities with Elixir, even remotely. At this point I’ve almost given up hope for working with Elixir, and am applying for work with more “mainstream” programming languages, hoping that my Elixir experience will at least count for something.

Thanks for the input; what are the languages you’re looking at targeting if not Elixir?

Ruby, Clojure, Erlang, Haskell, JS, Python, Java

On one hand I got to know a lot of people that teached me more about software development than my years of studying alone from different sources(I don’t have any formal education on software engineering or computer science).

Until very recently I was working as an optician selling eyeglasses(a family business) and had no prior professional experience in software development other than personal projects, open source libraries and helping other people. I wasn’t actively looking for a programming job because after a bunch of bad experiences with interviewers at local companies I had pretty much given up on that idea(why they want a graduated computer scientist to write some html and css escapes my comprehension).

But a couple weeks ago I got a job offer, and now I’m working remotely as an Elixir engineer at Packlane(there is a job listing in this forum).

So in terms of adoption and job opportunities, I’m inclined to say there are opportinities, and judging by the amount of new listings that appeared in the last couple weeks, I’d say that there is increasing demand.

The deeper you go with your Elixir and OTP knowledge, the better you’ll get at building concurrent systems. The same might apply to building distributed systems, but that depends on what you’ll be working on specifically. Knowing Phoenix will help you get on board with Rails and Django faster if you even need to. The downside is that it’s hard to go back from Elixir to “I-want-to-be-functional-and-immutable-but-I’m-not” world of React and TypeScript, etc. I also disliked the magical aspect of Rails as compared to Phoenix. It would be hard for me to go back to verboseness of C# and Java after working with Elixir codebases.

I tried leading an adoption of Elixir in one of my previous gigs, but the management pulled the plug on it, partly due to the pandemic. That’s why I decided to go all in and find a full-time Elixir job. It took me some time, but the upside of the COVID is that - I think - it accelerated the shift towards remote and async work. This allowed me to find a great job at a US-based company, which in terms of salary is a huge leap for EU-based people.

Now I’m coding Elixir full-time, I have time to be engaged in the lovely Elixir community, contribute something back. I think joining an “Elixir-based” company is the way to go.

It seems that the amount of posts per week in the Elixir Jobs section has grown significantly over the last 6 months or so. I highly recommend spending some time there.

There’s a big Java bubble in my city. Whenever I talk to any of those people, they’ve barely heard of Elixir, if ever. But it’s similar with Ruby with them. So the recruiters that revolve around that corporate bubble most probably never heard of Elixir either.

I’ve read opinions on HN that if you’re a good and/or senior developer, you’ll be fine with any technology: even if you want to code full time in a super niche language, you’ll find the right employer. I tend to agree with the premise, and with the flipside too - if you’re a junior and you aren’t determined to work in Elixir, I would recommend going with something mainstream for starters (Python? React?).

I’m keeping my fingers crossed for Elixir to become mainstream, but I’m not shying away from React work, so I should be fine either way. That’s important for me in terms of job security.

Thanks for your detailed input. I have years of java and unix-y based development (so lots of shell and other scripting; python, ruby, even perl!) and most recently full time python and even more recently *script (react/js, express/ts). I’ve wanted to work with Elixir for a long time, being an old Erlang (and Joe/Ulf) fanboy but haven’t had the opportunity. But, I’m making some headway there.

I’m a Frontend React developer professionally and an Elixir developer on my personal projects.

My interest for the Elixir language has always been a benefit when I was looking for jobs in React:

• I co-organized Elixir Workshop Meetups in Paris, France before the pandemic and I’m very interested in this language. Saying that on interviews help me demonstrate my involvement in Tech communities and it shows that I’m passionated about programming.
• Once, a recruiter wanted me to work for him because he was a tech person who loves FP and he saw that I organized these Elixir meetups.
• For my latest work, showing my interest on Elixir proves that I make efforts to learn cutting edge technologies. Also, when I explain why I care about this languages, it proves that I can make good business decision (because Elixir is a good business solution)

Overall, learning Elixir has really helped me on interviews and obviously, for developing my personal projects.

But that’s the side perk, I care about Elixir because it’s the perfect tool to build my projects.

I’m surprised because I see new job posts daily, and I have read recruiters saying it’s not easy to find an elixir developer. I have myself received job offers, but have to refuse for the moment as I’m working on my own project. So what you’re saying seems different to what I see and personally experienced so far.

It would be nice to know how easy/difficult it was for other elixir developers to find a job.

I’m a new elixir developer, I worked as a intern for 3 months (unpaid one because I wanted to get some elixir experience) and looking for junior roles since 3 4 month’s,
I’m doing lot of cold calling to recruiters and attended multiple interviews as well but could not get hired, I didn’t loose my hope and still trying, I have decided to pursue my career in elixir ecosystem.

What I observed was that there are very few or no company hires new and junior elixir developers and most of the recruiters say they are looking for more experienced and senior level developer’s,
Even most of the elixir tutorials also assumes some kind of experience from learns to have, I started my programming journey with python so I knew some basic concepts,

I tried flutter framework for some time it started in 2017 but it’s so popular in the market (I know it’s backed by Google and they are pushing it very hard into market) and there are lot of job openings for new developer’s

But question is elixir brings lot of power’s and capabilities onto the table still no mass adaption across the industry.
Because elixir ecosystem is not on boarding many new elixir developer’s that’s why?
Or elixir need’s more marketing?

This are just my opinions.