[derefr]

People who are hiring for roles using smaller languages know that there are few people local to them who are practitioners in the language. They tend to do one of two things about that:

1. They don't even bother advertising a position in local geographical "general" job boards. (Job postings on LinkedIn cost money for every day you have them up; they're a waste of resources if you can predict with high confidence that nobody will find the role through there.) Instead, they'll advertise globally but targeted to the language's community (i.e. language-specific job boards, forums and chat groups, newsletters, etc.) This is where the people using the language are looking, too, anyway, because they also know that there are too few local opportunities for it to make sense to invest the time in checking local job-boards for a job matching their skillset.

2. They don't bother hiring for the language. Instead, they hire for "experience with [relevant language paradigms]" and "experience with any of [similar, more-popular languages]" and then expect the new hire to learn the language on the job.

My personal job-criterion for hiring Elixir devs is "a polyglot in several different language paradigms, fluent in at least one functional language." I find that that filter actually predicts better whether they'll be a good Elixir dev, than actual experience using Elixir does.

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As an aside, there's also the fact that languages like Erlang/Elixir (or the MLs, or the Lisps, or Prolog, or...) tend not to be languages used for everything in a company, but instead tend to be languages used for the secret sauce core component of a company. A lot of the time, companies don't talk about using these languages, even though they do, because they consider them a competitive advantage over their rivals in whatever niche they occupy.

Heroku is an obvious example: much of their architecture was written in Erlang [nearly everything at first], but they never advertised that fact once in any official capacity. Likewise, HFT firms never mention they're using ML or Prolog, but many do, because trading bots are often just souped-up expert systems. The only time you find these things out, is when having a beer with ex-engineers from those companies.

[lostcolony]

I'll echo this - when I've worked in polyglot shops, specifically on a team that did a lot of Erlang, we hired for "exposure to functional paradigms", not Erlang. The only places that looked to hire the specific language (and even that was negotiable) were places that just had Java. And the average quality of applicants was universally worse.

[joelbluminator]

It's a common practice to at least say what stack you're working on on a job ad. If it's not a requirement I usually see "We use Rails but don't expect you to know it already".

[lostcolony]

The JD was, obviously, far more descriptive than the four words I listed there. I'm saying the actual, relevant requirement, not the description of the job.

[joelbluminator]

While you may be right, looking at job boards is the only objective measurement I can make. Maybe the jobs are hiding under different names, in different places. Who knows. To me, seeing there's little jobs and that there's a clear decline in Stackoverflow Trends, and that Elixir isn't even in the top 50 in Tiobe, this all means something. Hearing of people saying they can't get a job - means something. I'm sure if you're in one of the major tech cities in the U.S, you could probably land an Elixir job. You can also land a Haskell job. Or Ocaml or anything else under the sun. This means little for most people who don't live there.

[jake_morrison]

There is also a funny effect which is driving Python to be the most "popular" language. Someone will post a job advert for e.g. Java, and list Python as being one of the "nice to have" languages, either due to machine learning, devops, or just because it's nice to know a scripting language. Python is currently the nice to have language. So you see it on the list of hot languages, but in fact there are not all that many Python jobs, they are all actually e.g. Java jobs.