[hosh]

That is not true, especially with Section 174 (for the US). Right now, if you want to hire an Elixir engineer, you're better off finding a generalist willing to learn and use Elixir, and you would probably get someone who is very capable.

With Section 174 in play in the US, it tends to drive companies hiring specialists and attempting to use AI for the rest of it.

My own experience is that ... I don't really want to draw from the most plentiful and cheapest pool of workers. I've seen the kind of tech that produces. You basically have a small handful of software engineers carrying the rest.

Elixir itself is a kind of secret, unfair advantage for tech startups that uses it.

[carlmr]

>you're better off finding a generalist willing to learn and use Elixir, and you would probably get someone who is very capable.

This is a thing I really don't get. People are like "but what about the hiring pool". A competent software engineer will learn your stack. It's not that hard to switch languages. Except maybe going from Python to C++.

[toast0]

I'm biased, because I worked at WhatsApp, but it may be one of the most famous users of Erlang... and from its start until when I left (late 2019) I think we only hired three people with Erlang experience. Everyone else who worked in Erlang learned on the job.

We seemed to do pretty well, although some of our code/setup wasn't very idiomatic (for example, I'm pretty sure we didn't use the Erlang release feature properly at all)

[worthless-trash]

After you've done releases a few times, it ends up being quite easy. The biggest issues I had was complete release (aka erlang itself) updates.

Admittedly, I didn't have a whole company core product riding on my upgrades.

[toast0]

We just pushed code, compiled, and hotloaded... Pretty much ignoring the release files; we had them, but I think the contents weren't correct and we never changed the release numbers, etc.

For otp updates, we would shutdown beam in an orderly fashion, replace the files, and start again. (Potentially installing the new one before shutting down, I can't remember).

Post facebook, more of boring OS packages and slow rollouts than hotloading.

[worthless-trash]

Thank you for providing the information, its always good to see how others were rolling out updates.

[declan_roberts]

For a lot of people learning a new stack is a big perk to switching jobs.