Long story short from a business perspective - good luck logistically scaling a dev team from 2 founders to 100 devs as quickly as your app does. Elixir devs are hard to find and are expensive.
I have hired elixir devs recently, even worse: onsite only, and couldn't help myself with all the applications. And it wasn't like when hiring JS devs that I had to weed out the majority of super-junior candidates first. All around the statement of "hard to find devs" doesn't hold anymore as it used to. Just as a data point. And from the community often a saying is that there aren't enough Elixir jobs to begin with, so thats another story.
Having said that, a single team of seasoned Elixir devs can achieve more/better things than 100 average devs using the usual SPA/API/microservices-JS hell with all that modern unneccessary complexity. Saying this as a former DevOps guy babysitting the mess of multiple of these teams before.
Unrelated to elixir, but a company I worked at used a legacy and niche programming language in a few of their older projects. Their hiring strategy was similar: have a few seasoned programmers and hire juniors that are willing to learn (and there wasnt' a shortage of these). Never had a problem.
Elixir devs are quite easy to find if you post a job ad on ElixirForum.
Another good thing about Elixir is that the odds of you actually needing 100 devs coding in it are close to zero. I've been in financial EU startups that moved tens of millions a month (they were not huge) with the grand total of 4 devs. The only problem was clearing up customer requirements (i.e. our product people dropped the ball and left us doing most of their work).
And expensive? Yeah but I wouldn't be against that if I was an informed business owner. Most Elixir devs are refugees from other tech stacks and are quite senior. Good talent should be compensated well.
The reply's asking if you need 100 devs, might not realize this article was about building SaaS apps.
Having worked at multiple unicorn+ SaaS products, the product feature demands are significant.
Yes if you have one sole feature that you can pour all your engineering resources into like whatsapp delivering messages then it makes sense you might get away with 2 Elixir devs.
If you are working at a unicorn who just raised $250m in founding and now has to deliver 100 new features this year... well the elegance of the language won't help as much as you think.
> good luck logistically scaling a dev team from 2 founders to 100 devs
You'll never need 100 devs to work on a single elixir project. I as a solo dev built out the backend for my startup to profitable. We keep discussing bringing on a new developer during the occasional crunch but its been 5 years of operation and we haven't really needed it aside from increasing the bus factor. features go out fast enough as is. elixir is very productive.
based on my experience, if you need more than 5 developers, you should separate out features to independent systems and have them communicate with each other over established interfaces. Then you can use the language specialized to the task at hand. Either way, 100 engineers on a single codebase is not going to be efficient no matter what language you are working in.
That said, this article is about startup. the name of the game is to crank out features and aquire users. elixir is performant enough that you're not blowing your budget on cloud infrastructure and high level enough that you can build out and maintain your mvp with a skeleton crew.
If you run into a situation where you suddenly need to scale to 100 engineers, thats a great problem. it means you have revenue.
I would be interested, if I could maybe learn from a more experienced Elixir dev on the job for a month or so (even for temporarily reduced pay while I am catching up). I am quite quick at picking up languages and have broad experience in many languages and their concepts. I imagine there are more people like me out there, who would be happy to learn something new on the job and a nice language like Elixir at that.
I don't think devs and talents are too hard to find, if you are willing to look and be flexible.
this doesn’t track with my experience. every time i’ve posted an elixir job we had at least a couple dozen qualified, experienced candidates and a fairly diverse applicant pool.
you just have to post where they are. i strongly recommend the newsletters, the jobs channel on the elixir slack, and elixirforums. all great resources.
We went through a round of recruiting (Elixir app here) and found that as reflected on the StackOverflow survey from last year, a lot of people are willing to learn Elixir at the moment.
We've had non senior people onboarded a few months and they are doing well with Elixir at the moment, fwiw!
Having said that, a single team of seasoned Elixir devs can achieve more/better things than 100 average devs using the usual SPA/API/microservices-JS hell with all that modern unneccessary complexity. Saying this as a former DevOps guy babysitting the mess of multiple of these teams before.