Do you guys think it’s possible to get hired as a senior elixir developer without having professional experience with it?
I’m asking this because I’m a developer with more than 8 years of experience (and atm my title is senior software engineer). I managed to get approved for one elixir position but it was mid level and the salary was not as much I make at the moment. I was really happy to get the job offer but had to decline because of salary and yes even tho I love elixir I still have my bills to pay and every penny counts (unfortunately).
At least in this interview I was quite clear that I didn’t have experience with elixir before but during the other phases of the the same interview process things got really technical.
But my point is..basically in the “elixir hiring world” if I apply for senior elixir dev it’s 100% required that I need to have like 3+ years with Elixir? Or that I know everything about otp (and all the ecosystem around it?) like all my experience with other techs leading projects etc are not useful at all? I will just have to accept that I will never be able to get a little bit more senior job for Elixir?
Just for discussion :)))) " The Elixir Hiring Paradox: Passion vs. Paycheck"
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 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.
