Hard to say but have in mind that Elixir jobs are not only in this forum. I’ve had a good amount of leads from HackerNews’ monthly “Who’s Hiring?” thread, and no small amount of LinkedIn leads as well.

I had no trouble interviewing for weeks, almost back to back every day, at 1-2 meetings for the day, one year ago.

But I’ll admit that at my last search I definitely saw repeating names several times so that’s another data point. The Elixir jobs world is not huge.

Only insofar as employers believing that doing stuff with Elixir/Phoenix is cheaper for them. (Which they seem to believe BTW.)

I was regularly told by former colleagues and ElixirForum frequenters that Elixir jobs have a hard payment ceiling, usually 5000 EUR a month (although exceptions for bigger sums are made for senior devs or consultants).

I have no market data but I’d say Elixir’s job market has been growing slowly and steadily for the last 6 or so years. So there definitely are more Elixir jobs today compared to last year this time. But I don’t think the growth is explosive, or that the market itself is huge. It’s IMO big enough though.

Basically: be able to completely maintain a Phoenix project by yourself. That will make you sought after.

A good starting checklist is:

• Ecto schemas
• Ecto migrations
• Phoenix views
• Phoenix templates
• Phoenix controllers
• Phoenix layouts
• Phoenix contexts
• The basics of HTTP(s) security like CORS and how to set it up in Phoenix
• Assets compilation (with webpack or esbuild)
• Some basic CSS so you can apply classes to HTML elements
• BONUS POINTS and very liked by employers: DevOps skills like setting up and maintaining the production deployment stack at AWS, GCP, DigitalOcean or Heroku

Boom, you are now desired by Elixir employers.

The jobs channel on slack, threads on Twitter, and posts on this board have picked up in the past year. For my own amusement I scanned through the “Who’s Hiring Dec 2021” thread on Hacker News and put together a tally of hits per backend language—this isn’t unique per posting:

• Elixir - 14
• Rails - 44
• Python - 62
• Node - 32
• C# - 9
• Rust - 32
• Golang - 15
• Java - 6
• Kotlin - 12
• PHP - 9

Elixir is doing alright

I never really made technology decisions based on “market size”. I learned C# because my school taught it, went with Rails because it was sexy, went with Meteor because it was productive, went with Typescript because it was better than javascript – and finally I went with Elixir in 2016 because it’s lovely to use and makes my life easier.

If you’re good you can get a job with anything. If anything, if you go with a super mainstream language you are competing with everybody and their momma. Tell your friend to use something that brings him joy, life is too short. For example, I would neck myself expeditiously if I had to write Rust for my day to day job.