How has knowing Elixir changed your employment possibilities?

[lawik]

Elixir has been great for me. I already had experience on paper to go for senior positions.

It niched me down which provides clarity of purpose. And I reslly enjoy working with it.

The hiring thing is tricky to talk about because even among intermediate to senior people some will have the experience that it is hard. Some that it is easy. This is likely where people share anecdotes and the real answer is that we don’t have data.

Also, hiring processes are pretty arbitrary and full of human factors. So someone can have a hard time for reasons unrelated to the opportunities out there.

I think it is quite doable to find work in Elixir when you have some experience. I do consulting so I don’t look for employment. I’ve had plenty of opportunities for both.

Now, with a clearer niche you also give up some conveniences. There’s a bit of a lottery on whether local opportunity exists at all but you’d be surprised, I’ve had multiple in Gothenburg which is not a big place.

Remote is what I’d suggest if that works for you. Some people also move for work. Haven’t tried that.

Now junior opportunity sucks. I think it sucks industry-wide. It is the long-tail of job openings, everyone is asking for experience. Our long-tail means that the postings for juniors are in single digits. The juniors I know that look for Python or JS work aren’t happy either. If you are in this situation, reach out on email, I can’t guarantee opportunity but I’m happy to try to help.

Elixir has been a very good choice for me in several dimensions. Primarily satisfaction. Even did a recent post about it: Underjord | It is not about Elixir

[binarytemple]

Well, I’ve just found one reason you may not be seeing Elixir jobs on Linkedin at least…

[davearonson]

To get back to the thread-title question:

It’s a bit late for it to change my employment possibilities all that much, as I’m semi-retired. However, it can still influence that “semi” part. I’d be much more likely to actually consider taking on a hands-on project (versus the advice-giving I’m now emphasizing), if it were in Elixir rather than in Ruby – despite Ruby being my current favorite and strongest language.

[mindok]

A slightly different take here…

With Elixir you have a better opportunity than almost any other language to create your own software business. Code is terse, and the types of batteries that are included in the run-time make deployment and managing infrastructure so much easier. For most line of business apps you can get away with Postgres (or Your favourite RDBMS) and the run-time deployed by simply copying a self-contained directory into place and starting the app (obviously you would want to do some hardening too). You can write pretty nifty UIs without JavaScript and the associated webpack fights and never ending update loop.

This lets you go a long way by yourself. If you decide to raise capital and build a team, this also lets you negotiate on more favourable terms than if you have to go big early.