Is Professional Elixir Experience Mandatory for Senior Roles?

It will depend on the company. Some companies hire devs and knowing the language is not required. I‘ve heard NU Bank does it, and they are OK that devs will learn Clojure during first X months.

But, I think this is not the norm. Usually a senior Elixir role expects that you know Elixir. If it is your priority to work with Elixir, you‘ll have to start not as senior, most likely by sacrificing the salary. You will get back to senior fast though. But if a stable high income is more important, then that‘s the way it is.

I agree with @egze’s comments. In my own case I had many years of .NET experience but a few years ago took nearly a 50% pay cut to change to Elixir vs taking another .NET job that would have paid a similar amount to what I was previously earning.

I was very lucky that I could manage the 50% cut and at least in my case it’s been 100% worth it.

I’ve continued working with Elixir and my salary has re-bounded and then some. More importantly, I actually enjoy my job and the tech that I am working with, I’m surprised how much of a difference it has made in my overall happiness. Obviously results will vary but for me some short term financial pain was very much worth it.

I see, but harsh!

Yes, it is possible.

I had no prior professional experience in Elixir when I landed my first “Senior Elixir Developer” position.

At that point I had 6 years of professional developing experience in Go, Python and a bit of Ruby, of which 1 year have been under the title of a senior.

What I had though was a papertrail of helpful activity in the forums and some contributions towards open source projects in the broader BEAM ecosystem.

After having tried to land a Junior position, even considering a cut in salary, just to be in Elixirland, eventually a recruiter contacted me and offered tthe Elixir Senior position.

So yeah, I think this massively depends on the company.

The current “health” of the job market also plays a role, I guess, and I do not hear much of good things about it currently…

I’ve been a part of hiring processes (very small companies with less than 20 employees) that resulted in offers to candidates with demonstrable competency in Elixir (data structures, major libraries, idioms) without even asking about professional experience. Conversely, we have offered mid level positions to people who had multiple years of professional experience but could not demonstrate competency in areas we deemed critical (struggled to articulate a specific opinion about how to use contexts in a Phoenix application, to take a recent example, could only say something like “put your business logic in there”). Before taking that step we did a pairing session to better gauge that competency and found they also had weaknesses in domain modelling and composing complicated queries using Ecto as well as raw SQL. However, in the cases I’m thinking of, the former had 10+ years of other experience, the latter (who seemed like a great candidate in other respects but did not accept the offer for reasons similar to OP) had switched careers in the last 2-3 years.

So basically no I would say not only is experience in the language not mandatory it is also not sufficient. I think probably total professional experience is a better indicator after 5 or so years but even then there are people who are not really suited for higher engineering roles and do better when they shift into technical management positions.

From my personal experience and countless elixir interviews over the last 3+ years, I can say that the mental process behind what is deemed necessary for the job is always up to the hiring managers and subsequently the developers that make the technical interview, and what they’ve dreamed that night.

In most cases, their thought process is something they’ve read on linkedin or their course on “how to become a great hiring manager”. I’ve been turned down once because I don’t share my professional career on linkedin, as that manager said that this is a mandatory professional platform for every developer . Sadly, the same goes for developers, most of them are not qualified to interview or asses skills and they do a horrible job at this.

So as a short conclusion, it depends on who you stumble. If the folk that interviews you is skilled, you should be out of each interview in 10-15 minutes at max, as it is very easy to find if a person has meaningful experience behind his belt with a few right questions, especially for seniors.

I knew a guy that had the luck to do the same after coming from a JS only background. Sadly after about 1 month of struggling to grasp more advanced concepts around debugging and creating new features in a very big elixir project, he blew it. Can’t say for sure if lack of elixir specific experience would have made the difference, but it would have definitely helped in his case.

This assumes that those were high profile engineering jobs, and not just high profile interviews because the pay is good. I’m not going to assume that was the case, however I’ve seen a lot of developers (especially high performers or naturally talented ones) get carried away really hard in an attempt to find the perfect candidate by making some impossible standards that even they could barely pass, whereas a good enough candidate would be more than enough to cover such a position.

Not sure what you mean by a “high profile interview” but likely this was neither. Like I said small company and in the non-profit/public service space as well. The advantage to small companies is the potential to impact culture. I brought Elixir with me, our last hire brought TypeScript, before that someone trained as a data scientist brought R. But being willing to accept a pay cut helps a lot.

My own salary is probably almost half of market but I have had enough experience with big orgs and start ups that I’m not going anywhere. Luckily engineers remain so well compensated in comparison to other kinds of work that it barely feels like a sacrifice (I was in academia previously)

It’s not uncommon to see people hiring elixir devs for VC funded startups that pay much more above the market, this is what I assumed was the case.

Maybe, I can’t say it worked for me. I used to work with small companies where I was severly underpaid only to get into this new market where it takes more than half a year of interviews to arrive at an offer, where you realize only after being hired that the entire department ships code to production with zero tests and debugs issues for days in a fully undocumented codebase. The reality is that if I invested even a part of the time I did in learning engineering in something else, I would have had a much better income and be most probably self-employed, having much more freedom.

Offtopic aside, in the last years I’ve never seen elixir positions that would accept folk coming from other ecosystems with a pay cut. I’ve tried a few times to suggest a much smaller salary to be able to land a job, but the usual reaction was always negative, I guess the assumption was that there was something wrong with me if I’m offering that.

In Canada right now. Yes, you need the exact experience the position is looking for. For any senior position, companies are receiving hundreds of applications instead of the one or two they received a few years ago. And even then, I’ve seen companies keeping jobs open for months waiting for the perfect person to apply. Now is not the time to be thinking of switching jobs or languages.