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I think the Clojure job market is pretty good for senior developers but bad for junior developers. Anecdotal evidence, but I saw someone a few months ago who ha

I think the Clojure job market is pretty good for senior developers but bad for junior developers. Anecdotal evidence, but I saw someone a few months ago who had an active Clojure blog, gave talks on Clojure, contributed to multiple interesting projects on GitHub, but was unable to find a job before literally running out of money and going homeless. That could just be a weird situation, but I almost never see any job listings looking for junior developers, and when I do, they tend to be in Europe/Canada rather than the U.S.

thrower123 7y ago
I am not overly familiar with Clojure, but is it possible to be expert at Clojure, and not be able to parlay that into some other JVM language job? It might be a bit depressing, but I would think that one could take a Java job in a pinch if one had one's back against the wall.
- pixelperfect 7y ago
  I think anyone who's an expert in any general-purpose programming language can find a way to parlay that into a job, since it's much easier for them to learn another language, but knowing Clojure doesn't help much for learning other JVM languages. My guess is an expert C++ programmer could pick up Java faster than a Clojure programmer.
hota_mazi 7y ago
> Anecdotal evidence, but I saw someone a few months ago who had an active Clojure blog, gave talks on Clojure, contributed to multiple interesting projects on GitHub, but was unable to find a job before literally running out of money and going homeless That's a bit hard to believe. Surely someone in this situation would settle with taking a job programming in a different language instead of going homeless? It's also possible they placed unreasonable demands (I notice a lot of people looking for jobs in niche languages often ask to work 100% remotely too). If you work in a niche language, you need to be ready to compromise in certain areas, such as having to relocate.
- pixelperfect 7y ago
  https://twitter.com/porkostomus/status/1151595347157737472 https://twitter.com/porkostomus/status/1151595347157737472 I agree, if this person was acting entirely rationally they probably would have switched to learning JS and found a job by now. My only point is that there aren't many opportunities for junior-level Clojure developers who don't stand out as exceptional in some way.

thrower123 7y ago

I am not overly familiar with Clojure, but is it possible to be expert at Clojure, and not be able to parlay that into some other JVM language job? It might be a bit depressing, but I would think that one could take a Java job in a pinch if one had one's back against the wall.

pixelperfect 7y ago
I think anyone who's an expert in any general-purpose programming language can find a way to parlay that into a job, since it's much easier for them to learn another language, but knowing Clojure doesn't help much for learning other JVM languages. My guess is an expert C++ programmer could pick up Java faster than a Clojure programmer.

hota_mazi 7y ago

> Anecdotal evidence, but I saw someone a few months ago who had an active Clojure blog, gave talks on Clojure, contributed to multiple interesting projects on GitHub, but was unable to find a job before literally running out of money and going homeless That's a bit hard to believe. Surely someone in this situation would settle with taking a job programming in a different language instead of going homeless? It's also possible they placed unreasonable demands (I notice a lot of people looking for jobs in niche languages often ask to work 100% remotely too). If you work in a niche language, you need to be ready to compromise in certain areas, such as having to relocate.

pixelperfect 7y ago
https://twitter.com/porkostomus/status/1151595347157737472 https://twitter.com/porkostomus/status/1151595347157737472 I agree, if this person was acting entirely rationally they probably would have switched to learning JS and found a job by now. My only point is that there aren't many opportunities for junior-level Clojure developers who don't stand out as exceptional in some way.