[p4wnc6]

My experience has been two-pronged with Scala.

About half of companies using Scala are only doing so because it is a trendy way to trick people into continuing to maintain god-awful legacy Java (basically same for Clojure too) -- and in these places they code Scala like it is Java, e.g. use mutability everywhere, poor code style, no emphasis on functional patterns.

The other half seem like legit and interesting jobs, but they tend not to believe that self-taught Haskell experience, or on-the-job machine learning experience with say Python (even with pyspark) is translatable to Scala, and they heavily emphasize seeking people who are specifically experienced in exactly their tech stack already and immersed in the culture of it.

Either way it creates barriers that make it seem like my quality of life wouldn't be very good switching to Scala. But if I found a company that valued what I already can do with Python and my statistics experience, and was happy partially training me / helping me while I teach myself idiomatic Scala, that would be great. It just seems impossible to find that, even though some companies pay lip service to that idea.

[SatvikBeri]

If you're in/willing to relocate to San Francisco, feel free to message me–I definitely can relate to your experience about dramatically different Scala cultures, and could recommend some companies that will likely value your experience while being willing to train you in Functional Scala (including my current employer, where I lead a Scala study group.)

[p4wnc6]

I appreciate that -- unfortunately I am focusing mostly on the Eastern US for family reasons and I doubt SF would work out for me. Glad to hear there are some good Scala companies out there though.