3 ms·
Disclaimer: Below is my experience and shouldn't be regarded as universal fact. I've been hiring and wildly advertising Lisp jobs for around 10 years now in al
by reikonomusha 5y ago
Disclaimer: Below is my experience and shouldn't be regarded as universal fact.
I've been hiring and wildly advertising Lisp jobs for around 10 years now in all sorts of domains. Good candidates always come by, but you'd think that sentiments like yours ("hard to find a lot of jobs") would mean that supply is significantly greater than demand. There is enough supply (if your employer doesn't have lots of stipulations like local-only, citizen-only, etc.; unfortunately mine does), but it's still counter-intuitive to me that supply isn't overwhelming.
I find most people who are attracted to the jobs are
1. Long-time lispers who are pretty happy with their life as it is, and would only take the job if it was truly a killer deal (e.g., work a couple hours a week at a FAANG staff-level full-time salary);
2. College students who are fascinated with programming languages and have dabbled in Lisp; and
There are others, but those dominate in numbers.
I've never, not once, got an applicant that said, "I don't know Lisp but I'd love a job with an interesting language."
Not so remarkably, Haskell programmers, Clojure programmers, and others of those ilk rarely apply. I don't know why, but Lisp has a distinctly different philosophy and lacks a solid community like those languages have.
I've sort of come to the conclusion that advertising it as a Lisp job is perhaps not even so beneficial these days. My biggest success honestly has been finding people who are obviously good at programming, showing them Lisp, then seeing them take off in less than a week and fly to new heights.
- the_only_law 5y ago> I've never, not once, got an applicant that said, "I don't know Lisp but I'd love a job with an interesting language." I probably wouldn’t ever apply to a role that’s in a niche language I’ve never used. Most niche roles I’ve seen though want staff/principal level domain experts though. Last time I looked for a job in a niche language (Erlang in my case) most of what I could find was actually looking for Clojure or Scala developers or something, but decided to keyword dump every functional language they’d ever heard of.
- kqr 5y agoI think the counter-intuitiveness comes from the idea that low demand must equal high supply. It could also just be an illiquid market in both directions; supply and demand both low and roughly matched, but inefficiently.
- ahefner 5y agoI think very much this. I've known Lisp for a longish time now (even used it at work on occasion) but never considered to seek out a "Lisp job" because language choice is far from the most important criteria in a job. At the moment I probably slot into his first category.
- Infernal 5y ago> I've never, not once, got an applicant that said, "I don't know Lisp but I'd love a job with an interesting language." I don’t know Lisp and I’d love a job with an interesting language - but it would never occur to me to apply to a job requiring experience with a language that I don’t have experience in.
- reikonomusha 5y agoI think these meme job ads (we need 30 years of Go experience), as well as inexperienced technical recruiters and software engineering managers, have soured the market. If somebody is a good programmer, the last thing I care about is whether they know what NRECONC means... all that stuff can be figured out on the job.