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Very curious about the recent surge of Elixir / Erlang posts on HN, is there a reason for this? How is the the job market surrounding this as well for Elixir /

Very curious about the recent surge of Elixir / Erlang posts on HN, is there a reason for this? How is the the job market surrounding this as well for Elixir / Erlang devs?

Teifion 5y ago
As a sample size of 1 I can say I didn't have an issue finding an Elixir job and those I did speak to were keen to get an Elixir dev asap. For context I have a few years in Elixir and over 10 as a developer in general. Better yet, the jobs in question were remote only.
linkdd 5y ago
I don't really know about the job market, but Erlang/OTP has been a very fine piece of technology for the past 30 to 40 years. Elixir is quite new (2015) and with every release it gains in maturity, and the ecosystem is growing. IMHO, Mix was a game changer in terms of tooling. Also, with tools like Horde[0] and libcluster[1], it became very easy to setup an Erlang/Elixir cluster on Kubernetes. When you work with distributed systems, the OTP framework is a godsend, it's no surprise to me that it's finally getting traction. Also, I like to use Rambo[2] to call small go/rust binaries that I ship with my Docker images, useful for features where performance is important. [0] - https://hexdocs.pm/horde/readme.html [1] - https://hexdocs.pm/libcluster/readme.html [2] - https://hexdocs.pm/rambo/Rambo.html
- derefr 5y ago
  > Elixir is quite new (2015) I suppose you can say that; that’s when it 1.0ed. But Elixir was surprisingly stable pre-1.0; I was writing production Elixir 0.6 code at Spawngrid in 2012! Really, the 1.0 announcement felt more like a formality than anything; there was no discontinuous switch from “throwing features at the wall” to “considered engineering.” Changes to Elixir have always been considered — and props to Jose Valim for that! :)
- Zababa 5y ago
  > Elixir is quite new (2015) and with every release it gains in maturity, and the ecosystem is growing. One thing I really like is that it's considered mostly done. The community has the wisdom of not always trying to add new features and deprecating old ones. There's no 2.0 planned but that doesn't stop people from doing impressive work like Nx. I don't know about the ecosystem, but the language itself seem like a stable investment.
  - linkdd 5y ago
    This also has the benefit that your code is likely to keep working in 10 years.
    - Zababa 5y ago
      That's what I meant by "stable investment".
ralmidani 5y ago
I am starting my first Elixir role tomorrow. I come in with no real-world experience (edit: no real-world experience with Elixir specifically - I have a mid-senior level of experience using other languages), just some tutorials (Elixir Koans and Pragmatic Studio) which helped me submit a decent code sample. There aren’t a ton of Elixir roles, but hiring managers also recognize the shortage of devs so for a junior or mid-senior role they might overlook a lack of formal experience with the language. Elixir roles also seem to have pay scales as well as work arrangement flexibility that are higher-than-average. Geography-wise, I’ve noticed growing, “hipster” cities like Columbus (where I live), Denver, and Austin have a pretty decent share of the Elixir job postings (although, again, if you want to live elsewhere there are lots of fully-remote Elixir roles out there).
derefr 5y ago
More demand than supply, definitely. It’s hard to hire Erlang/Elixir devs from outside. Some companies just avoid using the platform because of that, but others (like my own company, Covalent) hire devs who seem like they’re experienced in learning languages generally, and then train them in Erlang/Elixir internally. These devs don’t move around much, though — a company willing to do internal promotion/education is usually pretty good at retaining talent. So new companies looking for Elixir devs still don’t find as many as they’d like. (An interesting other side effect of this dynamic is that it’s easier to hire senior Erlang/Elixir people than junior ones, since most Elixir devs you’ll find that have ever used the language for anything serious, learned it at work, and so usually have a decent chunk of their career already behind them.)
brightball 5y ago
Elixir shops are learning quickly that the best bet is probably to hire a senior dev that wants to learn and just give them a couple of weeks to learn. As for the surge in interest, I can’t speak for everybody but when I dove into the language I realized it addressed virtually every short term and long term problem that I’ve experienced in my programming career. The rules it sets out force things to be done in such a way that many issues are avoided as a by product. I find it balances all of my concerns better than anything else (productivity, performance, maintainability, scalability, learning curve, concurrency, stack simplification, capability, refactorability).
- dimitrios1 5y ago
  If you are one of these shops please email me :) I have been dipping my toe in functional land through fantasyland / ramda
- javajosh 5y ago
  Yeah, I'd be into that.
- tobinharris 5y ago
  We do this. We're only a small 12-person software agency, we have two Elixir developers right now. When we hired the 2nd, we looked for someone who had good knowledge of Node, Rails, Laravel or whatever and were excited to learn Elixir/Phoenix. Then they completed a Udemy course and started practicing. It worked out pretty great!
- marcandre 5y ago
  I was hired by super.mx with 3 days of elixir under my belt. We're still hiring btw...
  - lejboua 5y ago
    Really liked the recent podcast and hearing from you how you fixed those slow compilation times issues. Looking forward to hear more from you!
- 5y ago
joelbluminator 5y ago
I guess the reason is enough people upvote it? HN is pretty popular for nichier tech like Clojure, Julia etc. It gets as many votes as Java I think because the community in general likes reading about exotic stuff.
- ralmidani 5y ago
  Are Erlang/Elixir really that exotic? I interpret exotic in our context to mean a language aimed at academics and very advanced programmers but lacking mainstream appeal. Erlang/Elixir strike me as very pragmatic and, compared to Haskell/Lisp/Clojure/Scala/Julia/etc., they seem more beginner-friendly.
  - joelbluminator 5y ago
    I don't think Erlang/Elixir is many people's first language, no. It's advanced. Someone who is doing their 1st programming project would be better off choosing javascript / php / ruby if they are building for the web. It's quite unlikely their first use cases will be 2 million concurrent web sockets. So given it's not mainstream and it has the advanced aura I think it's fair to call it exotic or " language aimed at academics and very advanced programmers but lacking mainstream appeal" as you just said.
    - sergiomattei 5y ago
      I don't think Elixir is aimed at academics, though. It's very clear that it tries to be as pragmatic as possible.
      - joelbluminator 5y ago
        Yeah agree, you can erase academics from that sentence. Academics mostly use Python and R and Python is actually super pragmatic.
        ralmidani 5y ago
toast0 5y ago
I'm retired but look around a bit for interesting jobs using Erlang, and I don't see a whole lot of listings that mention it. More that mention Elixir. And one company (smarkets) that specifically calls out that they're not using it anymore. But, some of that is I think because, as others noted, it's hard to find Erlang developers, it's easier to target for good developers and convince them to learn Erlang on the job. So I'm guessing some places use it and don't mention it. I was working at an Erlang shop and out of all of our hires and interviews I did, we hired one person with Erlang experience (from a conference) and I recall interviewing one other candidate with experience. Oh and we had an intern who did a college course with Erlang, but interned in a client group that was limited to j2me (sorry!).
atraac 5y ago
As far as I've seen, Elixir job market for Europe is almost nonexistent, sadly.
- joelbluminator 5y ago
  Don't upset the zealots by talking about reality please, you will get downvoted to oblivion.
weatherlight 5y ago
1) It’s worthy of the praise and attention, ( The BEAM is a marvel of engineering). 2) It’s just “exotic” enough for people who work in Java/Ruby/JS to be interested to read and upvote. The articles shared tend to be easy to understand and bite sized. 3) There’s enough demand out there and Elixir Devs are usually paid pretty well, that market( for the time being,) is pretty small.
pessimizer 5y ago
It's not a particularly recent trend irt HN: https://www.flickr.com/photos/stilist/3348380060/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/stilist/3348380060/

Very curious about the recent surge of Elixir / Erlang posts on HN, is there a reason for this? How is the the job market surrounding this as well for Elixir / Erlang devs?

Teifion 5y ago

As a sample size of 1 I can say I didn't have an issue finding an Elixir job and those I did speak to were keen to get an Elixir dev asap. For context I have a few years in Elixir and over 10 as a developer in general. Better yet, the jobs in question were remote only.

linkdd 5y ago

I don't really know about the job market, but Erlang/OTP has been a very fine piece of technology for the past 30 to 40 years. Elixir is quite new (2015) and with every release it gains in maturity, and the ecosystem is growing. IMHO, Mix was a game changer in terms of tooling. Also, with tools like Horde[0] and libcluster[1], it became very easy to setup an Erlang/Elixir cluster on Kubernetes. When you work with distributed systems, the OTP framework is a godsend, it's no surprise to me that it's finally getting traction. Also, I like to use Rambo[2] to call small go/rust binaries that I ship with my Docker images, useful for features where performance is important. [0] - https://hexdocs.pm/horde/readme.html [1] - https://hexdocs.pm/libcluster/readme.html [2] - https://hexdocs.pm/rambo/Rambo.html

derefr 5y ago
> Elixir is quite new (2015) I suppose you can say that; that’s when it 1.0ed. But Elixir was surprisingly stable pre-1.0; I was writing production Elixir 0.6 code at Spawngrid in 2012! Really, the 1.0 announcement felt more like a formality than anything; there was no discontinuous switch from “throwing features at the wall” to “considered engineering.” Changes to Elixir have always been considered — and props to Jose Valim for that! :)
Zababa 5y ago
> Elixir is quite new (2015) and with every release it gains in maturity, and the ecosystem is growing. One thing I really like is that it's considered mostly done. The community has the wisdom of not always trying to add new features and deprecating old ones. There's no 2.0 planned but that doesn't stop people from doing impressive work like Nx. I don't know about the ecosystem, but the language itself seem like a stable investment.
- linkdd 5y ago
  This also has the benefit that your code is likely to keep working in 10 years.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    That's what I meant by "stable investment".

ralmidani 5y ago

I am starting my first Elixir role tomorrow. I come in with no real-world experience (edit: no real-world experience with Elixir specifically - I have a mid-senior level of experience using other languages), just some tutorials (Elixir Koans and Pragmatic Studio) which helped me submit a decent code sample. There aren’t a ton of Elixir roles, but hiring managers also recognize the shortage of devs so for a junior or mid-senior role they might overlook a lack of formal experience with the language. Elixir roles also seem to have pay scales as well as work arrangement flexibility that are higher-than-average. Geography-wise, I’ve noticed growing, “hipster” cities like Columbus (where I live), Denver, and Austin have a pretty decent share of the Elixir job postings (although, again, if you want to live elsewhere there are lots of fully-remote Elixir roles out there).

derefr 5y ago

More demand than supply, definitely. It’s hard to hire Erlang/Elixir devs from outside. Some companies just avoid using the platform because of that, but others (like my own company, Covalent) hire devs who seem like they’re experienced in learning languages generally, and then train them in Erlang/Elixir internally. These devs don’t move around much, though — a company willing to do internal promotion/education is usually pretty good at retaining talent. So new companies looking for Elixir devs still don’t find as many as they’d like. (An interesting other side effect of this dynamic is that it’s easier to hire senior Erlang/Elixir people than junior ones, since most Elixir devs you’ll find that have ever used the language for anything serious, learned it at work, and so usually have a decent chunk of their career already behind them.)

brightball 5y ago

Elixir shops are learning quickly that the best bet is probably to hire a senior dev that wants to learn and just give them a couple of weeks to learn. As for the surge in interest, I can’t speak for everybody but when I dove into the language I realized it addressed virtually every short term and long term problem that I’ve experienced in my programming career. The rules it sets out force things to be done in such a way that many issues are avoided as a by product. I find it balances all of my concerns better than anything else (productivity, performance, maintainability, scalability, learning curve, concurrency, stack simplification, capability, refactorability).

dimitrios1 5y ago
If you are one of these shops please email me :) I have been dipping my toe in functional land through fantasyland / ramda
javajosh 5y ago
Yeah, I'd be into that.
tobinharris 5y ago
We do this. We're only a small 12-person software agency, we have two Elixir developers right now. When we hired the 2nd, we looked for someone who had good knowledge of Node, Rails, Laravel or whatever and were excited to learn Elixir/Phoenix. Then they completed a Udemy course and started practicing. It worked out pretty great!
marcandre 5y ago
I was hired by super.mx with 3 days of elixir under my belt. We're still hiring btw...
- lejboua 5y ago
  Really liked the recent podcast and hearing from you how you fixed those slow compilation times issues. Looking forward to hear more from you!
5y ago

joelbluminator 5y ago

I guess the reason is enough people upvote it? HN is pretty popular for nichier tech like Clojure, Julia etc. It gets as many votes as Java I think because the community in general likes reading about exotic stuff.

ralmidani 5y ago
Are Erlang/Elixir really that exotic? I interpret exotic in our context to mean a language aimed at academics and very advanced programmers but lacking mainstream appeal. Erlang/Elixir strike me as very pragmatic and, compared to Haskell/Lisp/Clojure/Scala/Julia/etc., they seem more beginner-friendly.
- joelbluminator 5y ago
  I don't think Erlang/Elixir is many people's first language, no. It's advanced. Someone who is doing their 1st programming project would be better off choosing javascript / php / ruby if they are building for the web. It's quite unlikely their first use cases will be 2 million concurrent web sockets. So given it's not mainstream and it has the advanced aura I think it's fair to call it exotic or " language aimed at academics and very advanced programmers but lacking mainstream appeal" as you just said.
  - sergiomattei 5y ago
    I don't think Elixir is aimed at academics, though. It's very clear that it tries to be as pragmatic as possible.
    - joelbluminator 5y ago
      Yeah agree, you can erase academics from that sentence. Academics mostly use Python and R and Python is actually super pragmatic.
      - ralmidani 5y ago

toast0 5y ago

I'm retired but look around a bit for interesting jobs using Erlang, and I don't see a whole lot of listings that mention it. More that mention Elixir. And one company (smarkets) that specifically calls out that they're not using it anymore. But, some of that is I think because, as others noted, it's hard to find Erlang developers, it's easier to target for good developers and convince them to learn Erlang on the job. So I'm guessing some places use it and don't mention it. I was working at an Erlang shop and out of all of our hires and interviews I did, we hired one person with Erlang experience (from a conference) and I recall interviewing one other candidate with experience. Oh and we had an intern who did a college course with Erlang, but interned in a client group that was limited to j2me (sorry!).

atraac 5y ago

As far as I've seen, Elixir job market for Europe is almost nonexistent, sadly.

joelbluminator 5y ago
Don't upset the zealots by talking about reality please, you will get downvoted to oblivion.

weatherlight 5y ago

1) It’s worthy of the praise and attention, ( The BEAM is a marvel of engineering). 2) It’s just “exotic” enough for people who work in Java/Ruby/JS to be interested to read and upvote. The articles shared tend to be easy to understand and bite sized. 3) There’s enough demand out there and Elixir Devs are usually paid pretty well, that market( for the time being,) is pretty small.

pessimizer 5y ago

It's not a particularly recent trend irt HN: https://www.flickr.com/photos/stilist/3348380060/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/stilist/3348380060/