[freedomben]

Elixir/Phoenix is my hobby. I build personal projects on it.

I was able to find a few jobs, but not a ton (this was a couple years ago). The jobs that are out there all wanted experience but obviously that's hard to do with a new platform. I got an interview with one company that I thought understood that I only had a few months experience as a hobbyist (which means I'll be doing a lot of Googling even for common APIs) but they rejected me. At this point my experience with professional Elixir has not been positive.

I love the language but I'll probably just stay a hobbyist, at least until things change.

[FeistyOtter]

It is an interesting (but probably very subjective) observation that the majority of companies with a rare or esoteric stacks hire only experienced devs with the stack and refuse to train them themselves. Maybe it is because they are smaller and lack resources. And on the contrary, in my experience, large companies based on common languages like Java, C#, JS and the like dedicate huge resources for training their junior programmers from the grounds up.

[ativzzz]

Which ultimately makes those rare and esoteric stacks less likely to survive because experienced engineers who don't have experience with those particular stacks have no ways of getting those jobs without experience in those jobs.

Companies like Jane Street make more sense. They use ocaml but they don't expect you to have any ocaml experience coming in, but they also have plenty of resources for training and hiring talented engineers.

[joelbluminator]

Think about young startups that aren't sure when the next round of cash will come and their personnel stay there on average 2, 2.5 years. Spending 6-8 months on getting a new developer productive with a new language is super expensive for such a company. In fact, employing juniors in general is pretty risky for such a company.

[paublyrne]

A senior developer though should be able to get productive with a new language in a few weeks. It's not such an investment ....

[joelbluminator]

Sorta true, often times not really. You can ship code that most likely works, but I'd still prefer a senior who knows the stack over you if I was the founder. You're saying in depth knowledge of a framework / language counts for nothing?

[ativzzz]

Of course, the startup is doing what it takes to survive. I'm not saying this approach is wrong in any way. I'm just saying that this will result in these niche stacks staying niche and have a much smaller dev pool to hire from, now and in the future.