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by sb8244 861 days ago
This doesn't track with my experience.

We scaled an org with both Ruby and Elixir (later, 1 of the 2 blessed languages) and there was no tangible difference in that way.

You could also scale in other ways like microservice. Elixir plays great in that world, as pretty much every language does.

Regarding one man armies. Usual way I've seen to scale is to find those one man armies and put less expensive Jr + mid engineers on their team and have them work together. I don't think that's an Elixir thing though.

I'm not trying to sell Elixir here. I think it has benefits in smaller org size that mellow out and equalize as a company grows. Also, startups should always work in whatever language is most comfortable to founding team.

1 comments

Hard to argue against anecdotal evidence one way or the other -- my view is probably skewed because I usually avoid big companies.

RE: microservices, yep, that's one of the ways to scale Elixir teams to more people indeed.

RE: one-man armies, agreed.

> I'm not trying to sell Elixir here. I think it has benefits in smaller org size that mellow out and equalize as a company grows.

No worries, I am sold for 8 years now. ;)

And yes, the benefits kind of plateau from one dev count and up I found. That was kind of the core of my comment, too.

> Also, startups should always work in whatever language is most comfortable to founding team.

Oh, absolutely. I love Elixir a lot but won't shill for it if I find myself in a situation where it would be a bad choice. Plus in startups development speed is probably the biggest asset of the programmers so I am not judging. (Though I don't want to work for startups anymore.)