I’m Developer who have 3 years professional experience as Full stack developer (mainly Nodejs as backend language and some Rails experience), I work remotely as I’m from a North African country.
While I’m happy with my current job but I decided is time to move on within next 4~6 months as I discovered the following:
The Company I work for takes 85% of what the client pays for my hourly rate
Got tired of taking over projects that adding package upon package to add on functionality that already exists in Rails, the fragmentation of the Node community and lack of documentation of many packages and every new version of package break almost everything
While I don’t claim to be rockstar programmer but I took over horrible codebases written for Nodejs which caused by fragmentation and low barrier to entry as javascript programmer
I discovered a Ruby when the client requested to build a Web app using it, Ruby was everything I wanted and it addressed all my issues from Node but…
Ruby/Rails is slow compared to other languages/Frameworks
Ruby Job market is saturated
so my search narrowed down to two languages
Go and Elixir
from my research I feel that I like Elixir more:
Elixir is a functional language, I never wrote anything using functional programming so this is opportunity to learn a new paradigm in programming
Readability, while I didn’t start learning Elixir but looking at source code online shows how easy it is to read and how hard to screw it up
The similarity to Ruby, I don’t mean it syntax wise but from the good documentation, easy to download libraries and awesome community.
My issue is when I tried to research remote jobs or Elixir jobs in general, I find almost each and every one of them requires +2 years of Ruby on rails experience
I’m going to learn Elixir and work on a side project in my free time after my full-time job which is kinda hard for me (I blame my laziness ).
I just wanted the community advice and what they think about my dilemma
Absolutely not. Ruby and Elixir are similar (language-features only) in ‘some’ language constructs and syntax only, nothing else. Not all syntax is the same, and the underlying systems are entirely different (Ruby is quite the opposite of functional). You absolutely do not need to know Ruby before Elixir and in my opinion knowing Ruby before Elixir will just slow your Elixir uptake.
As well as any job that suggest ruby knowledge when they work with Elixir (and not Ruby) is just showing that they do not know what they are talking about. ^.^;
As @OvermindDL1 mentioned, Elixir and Ruby are only similar superficially. They share a similar syntax, they share some language constructs, etc. Knowing Ruby will do little to nothing in helping you learn and understand Elixir code. The semantics of the two languages are very different.
With that said, I think the reason that most Elixir positions ask for Ruby experience is because not all companies are so new that they are built entirely on Elixir. They probably have some newer projects or rewrites happening in Elixir and some older services built in Ruby and Rails. So the reason they prefer to have some experience with Ruby and Rails is probably so that you can work on both the Elixir and Ruby code bases should the need arise.
At least, that was the reason we put Ruby experience on our job posting recently. Though, we didn’t say it was mandatory.
It is also completely possible that they person writing the job description is not on the technical team. This could lead someone from the technical team to mention that Elixir is similar to Ruby (I know I have said this to non-technical people in the past). Leading to the required Ruby experience on the job posting.
I would still suggest applying to those jobs. If you end up meeting with someone technical, it really should not matter to them if you do not know Ruby.
This - so many people are coming here with questions that have to do that while Elixir and Ruby share some syntactical features, they really differ in their philosophy.
The similirality between Ruby and Elixir is just like comparing two cars - both of them have 4 wheels, pedals, stereing wheels, engine and other stuff, but there’s a lot of difference between them, however if you know how to drive, you gonna handle different transmission etc. My pal works in Elixir, but he has Java experience, not Ruby
My issue is when I tried to research remote jobs or Elixir jobs in general, I find almost each and every one of them requires +2 years of Ruby on rails experience
I see a lot of Rails shops exploring or moving to Elixir, so – yeah, if
you work there you’d probably be expected to help maintain or port
legacy Rails apps.
Without Rails experience you just have a smaller pool of potential
opportunities right now. Though a little familiarity goes a long way,
and you might be able to talk your way into at least an interview
Thanks, @OvermindDL1, @Ankhers, @orestis for your responses, I’m aware that Ruby and Elixir don’t share anything syntax wise (One is imperative OOP and the other is functional), I meant in job requirement ways as Elixir used for concurrency and Ruby for whatever else job posting means
With that said, I think the reason that most Elixir positions ask for Ruby experience is because not all companies are so new that they are built entirely on Elixir. They probably have some newer projects or rewrites happening in Elixir and some older services built in Ruby and Rails. So the reason they prefer to have some experience with Ruby and Rails is probably so that you can work on both the Elixir and Ruby code bases should the need arise.
This makes sense, I guess there No Excuses Left, I should start learning Elixir in my free time.
Without Rails experience you just have a smaller pool of potential
opportunities right now. Though a little familiarity goes a long way,
and you might be able to talk your way into at least an interview:slight_smile:
I forget to mention that I have actual rails experience, deploying a full app to production, following rails way and best practices, like using Domain object model to structure the project, using magic actions, Devis/Power, Rspec, Resque…etc
I spent 6 months developing the app for the client but is nowhere compared to the required +2 RoR experience that some jobs posting wants but I got the idea that it meant to maintain or port legacy Rails apps.
I think the above is the reason. I would imagine many companies coming over to Elixir and Phoenix want to port their Ruby/Rails apps over and so it’s possible they think that if you have Ruby experience you will may be able to get a better understanding of what needs to be Elixified
(I blame my laziness ).
