Personally I don’t think a young dev should apply for such position anyway. When I said “young”, I meant in term of exposure to development in general.
So for such individuals, I would say keep learning what they want to learn. The Web is probably a good start though, but not just HTML and CSS, but the full stack one. Lot of techniques learned in Web development can be applied later on.
Understanding the BEAM is not trivial, but not that difficult. Once we have the fundamental understanding of programming, plus the desire to learn, then it can be done. I’m sure my coworkers would be able to learn Erlang/Elixir fully, but they have no desire to do so. Therefore, they were immediately put off by the foreign syntax.
To actually put ourselves in a position that other companies will want to hire, though, we need to work on our portfolio. I’m not sure how many companies actually do a good review of one’s GitHub, but it’s a good place to not only contribute to the community, but also show our progress over time.
It’s especially good when we can actually have one side project running in production, with a few users. I guess that counts as professional experience :).
