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I've been interested in learning Erlang, but haven't seen more than one or two jobs that hired for it. I'm probably looking in the wrong fields (back end) or lo

I've been interested in learning Erlang, but haven't seen more than one or two jobs that hired for it. I'm probably looking in the wrong fields (back end) or locations. Could someone point me? Is there a certain industry that has more predominant Erlang jobs?

square_usual 6y ago
There's no shortage of jobs looking for elixir developers, which is based on erlang.
- davidw 6y ago
  As sort of an aside, that can be an interesting lens to view hiring through. A while back I was looking around, and since I have some history with Erlang, was looking for roles involving Erlang and Elixir, among other things. I've architected and written production Erlang code that's deployed in products and know the system fairly well. But I don't have a lot of Elixir experience. Some companies were like "wow, that's a lot of BEAM experience - let's talk!". Others were like "my checkbox says Elixir, sorry". I'm old enough at this point to realize the latter were doing me a big favor.
  - h91wka 6y ago
    I passed a couple Elixir interviews with zero knowledge of this language :) You can just treat it as Erlang with funny syntax.
    - davidw 6y ago
      There are a few more substantial differences, like Elixir utiling binaries rather than Erlang's 'strings' that I think are nice improvements, but I was never worried about getting up to speed with Elixir. The tricky bits of working with BEAM are nicely illustrated here: https://ferd.ca/ten-years-of-erlang.html https://ferd.ca/ten-years-of-erlang.html
    - rkangel 6y ago
      Any sensible employer should treat Erlang and Elixir experience as equivalent. There are important differences, but it would only take 2 weeks for someone experienced with one to be pretty up to speed with the other. It is, for instance, the opposite situation to C and C++. In that case, they are languages that share syntax but you should code in fundamentally different ways. Erlang and Elixir don't share syntax, but all the important core concepts are the same.
cmrdporcupine 6y ago
Likewise; I've been dancing around Erlang playing with it on and off for about twenty years, but I'm at the stage in my life where to really dive into it I'd have to have a job where someone paid me to work in it (or Elixir, or both). It seems most jobs that want Erlang want specifically someone who has already been working in it, which is a bit of a specific thing, and a bit of a circular situation. Similar thing for Rust, which I'd also really be into working with professionally as well, but won't be able to where I work right now. (FWIW I'm a mature software engineer with experience across the stack, systems and app-level C++ mainly lately, but Java, Scala, Python prior to that. Deployed RabbitMQ at a startup many moons ago, but that's it for direct Erlang professionally)
- ipnon 6y ago
  It doesn't have the entrepreneur approval yet. Elixir is halfway between toy and legit and moving towards legit. I think we will be singing a different tune in a decade. It's hard to imagine the distributed systems status quo persisting so long. Software ideas have shorter lifespans.
h91wka 6y ago
There is employment channel here: https://erlanger.slack.com/ https://erlanger.slack.com/

square_usual 6y ago

There's no shortage of jobs looking for elixir developers, which is based on erlang.

davidw 6y ago
As sort of an aside, that can be an interesting lens to view hiring through. A while back I was looking around, and since I have some history with Erlang, was looking for roles involving Erlang and Elixir, among other things. I've architected and written production Erlang code that's deployed in products and know the system fairly well. But I don't have a lot of Elixir experience. Some companies were like "wow, that's a lot of BEAM experience - let's talk!". Others were like "my checkbox says Elixir, sorry". I'm old enough at this point to realize the latter were doing me a big favor.
- h91wka 6y ago
  I passed a couple Elixir interviews with zero knowledge of this language :) You can just treat it as Erlang with funny syntax.
  - davidw 6y ago
    There are a few more substantial differences, like Elixir utiling binaries rather than Erlang's 'strings' that I think are nice improvements, but I was never worried about getting up to speed with Elixir. The tricky bits of working with BEAM are nicely illustrated here: https://ferd.ca/ten-years-of-erlang.html https://ferd.ca/ten-years-of-erlang.html
  - rkangel 6y ago
    Any sensible employer should treat Erlang and Elixir experience as equivalent. There are important differences, but it would only take 2 weeks for someone experienced with one to be pretty up to speed with the other. It is, for instance, the opposite situation to C and C++. In that case, they are languages that share syntax but you should code in fundamentally different ways. Erlang and Elixir don't share syntax, but all the important core concepts are the same.

cmrdporcupine 6y ago

Likewise; I've been dancing around Erlang playing with it on and off for about twenty years, but I'm at the stage in my life where to really dive into it I'd have to have a job where someone paid me to work in it (or Elixir, or both). It seems most jobs that want Erlang want specifically someone who has already been working in it, which is a bit of a specific thing, and a bit of a circular situation. Similar thing for Rust, which I'd also really be into working with professionally as well, but won't be able to where I work right now. (FWIW I'm a mature software engineer with experience across the stack, systems and app-level C++ mainly lately, but Java, Scala, Python prior to that. Deployed RabbitMQ at a startup many moons ago, but that's it for direct Erlang professionally)

ipnon 6y ago
It doesn't have the entrepreneur approval yet. Elixir is halfway between toy and legit and moving towards legit. I think we will be singing a different tune in a decade. It's hard to imagine the distributed systems status quo persisting so long. Software ideas have shorter lifespans.

h91wka 6y ago

There is employment channel here: https://erlanger.slack.com/ https://erlanger.slack.com/