[jwr]

> for reasonable salaries

I think this is the key here. Clojure developers are expensive (see the Stack Overflow charts for how being a Clojure dev essentially guarantees a great salary) — but that's not because of them being Clojure developers, but rather because of them being more experienced, knowledgeable, and flexible than your "average" developer.

If you start a business and use Clojure, you should expect to hire more expensive developers. You will, however, need fewer of them, so this might all balance out in the end, especially as we all know that teams don't scale infinitely.

[beiller]

They are expensive purely because they are a smaller pool. I doubt they are automatically more capable. I did work with many and now write clonjre myself. Doesn't make me, or them automatically better devs imo!

[freshhawk]

They aren't automatically more capable, it's just a well known and frequently noticed fact that Clojure tends to attract more senior developers, and the community is very senior dev heavy compared to other language communities.

So of course that is interesting, probably says some important things, and moves the average salaries up as well. Everything points to "Clojure tends to attract some subset of better devs" rather than it making them better.

There are clearly also effects from the small pool of available candidates, the high output of experienced Clojure devs, etc but generally being in a smaller ecosystem doesn't drive prices up.