5 ms·

I'd love to see the internal explanation on how hiring kotlin for BE devs is easier than hiring elixir devs. That's like trying to pivot from finding unicorn t

• mr90210 4y ago
  Much, much easier.
• kotlin2 4y ago
  Kotlin in is very similar to Java. There are tons of Java devs. And tons of Kotlin devs who program for Android. There has to be an order of magnitude of magnitude (at least) more Kotlin devs than Elixer.
• RhodesianHunter 4y ago
  Hiring Kotlin devs is easy because you can just hire open minded Java devs.
  • TillE 4y ago
    Seriously, there are so few circumstances where a good developer absolutely requires deep experience in a specific language (or framework) on day one. Smart people can learn, and they can learn pretty quickly if it's not radically different. I'm currently doing a ton of C# work and it's great - my relevant professional background is basically all C++, with some Java in the very distant past.
    • RhodesianHunter 4y ago
      I think it really depends. If all you're doing is slinging JSON over an API then sure. If you're dealing with concurrency and distributed systems at medium to high scale you really want your senior people to be familiar with the language.
      • jonathankoren 4y ago
        Yeah, but you don't need that many to start. That knowledge will spread rather rapidly to where it's needed.
        • egeozcan 4y ago
          But that has also the danger of forming islands (mortgage code) which can be maintained by some (or, one) specific engineers.
          • jonathankoren 4y ago
            That can be mitigated by hiring senior engineers that understand engineering leadership, and having competent engineering management to specifically encourage knowledge transfer. It’s not really that hard.
      • FpUser 4y ago
        >"If you're dealing with concurrency and distributed systems at medium to high scale you really want your senior people to be familiar with the language." I've written my first application level thread/concurrency library for DOS in the 80s. So you can count me as experienced. In my opinion as long as one is senior developer and knows the subject language does not mean fuck all as long as it adequate and language / libraries support needed primitives. I've written distributed middleware with multithreading / concurrency in many languages including ones I did not know before starting the project.
        • daguava 4y ago
          Time doesn't mean experienced.
          • FpUser 4y ago
            You can challenge anyone with this type of arguments. I was doing this kind of programming and delivering successful solutions since the 80s. If you chose to doubt my expertise it is your right. Does not mean your opinion has a shred of truth in it.
    • doctor_eval 4y ago
      Yeah, I mean I hired a great Java dev to do Go work and she picked it up in 3 months... but I knew she was awesome, so I wasn't worried about it at all. But hiring someone you don't know, which is typical ... retraining in a new language feels like it surely adds to the already substantial risk of hiring.
    • egeozcan 4y ago
      I think the same as you, but let's admit that C# is one of the easiest languages to get into, especially with the magnificent tooling.
      • weego 4y ago
        I think everyone in this chain should admit that hiring the kinds of developers you can 'throw x language book at' and a week later you have a competent x lang developer is an incredibly expensive and time consuming processthat most companies will never be able to afford. Even if you can, you then have to solve the issue of keeping a department stocked full of senior devs happy when you have limited promotion/perk/raise options and so churn will likely be relatively high even in a healthy environment. It's a nice fantasy view of the market as an ideal world simulation but does not reflect the reality of hiring software engineers.
        • jen20 4y ago
          Surely the other solution is to improve the work environment such that it’s possible to hire the people you aspire to hire…
        • jackcviers3 4y ago
          You can't buy a book, keep it on a shelf, lend it to new hires, and afford to have an employee take a week out of being productive to learn something? Or you can't afford salaries for a company of people who have more than 5 years of development experience? Both sound like major dysfunctional problems.
          • RhodesianHunter 4y ago
            No one learns a new language effectively in a week.
  • ch4s3 4y ago
    You can hire any senior dev and give them the elixir book and a week to read it. You can also pick up someone junior who hasn’t learned anything wrong and coach them for a few months. I’ve successfully done both. The org I work in was one of the Elixir lang case studies and we still love using it, and have very little trouble hiring. It would be different if we had to hire 50 devs in less than 6 months, but we just don’t need to do that.
    • Apocryphon 4y ago
      Elixir is a functional language, which is definitely a less common paradigm than OO languages like Java, which Kotlin is very similar to. Plus you can hire Android devs.
      • ch4s3 4y ago
        Yeah of course, but the FP stuff is not very complicated in Elixir land. The heady stuff from ML family languages just isn’t there. The process model takes some time to adjust to, but a lot of JVM folks have used akka which is inspired by the BEAM. The tooling an docs all guide you in the right direction and usually code in the wild aims to be straightforward. I’ve really never had trouble onboarding people to Elixir unless they had started learning it solo as a Ruby dev, then they typically have to unlearn some stuff.
      • jrvarela56 4y ago
        Is this true anymore? I'm biased by HN content but feel like I've been hearing non-stop about FP for the past 10 years.
        • jedberg 4y ago
          You're hanging around crowds that talk about FP. :) Right now I'm working with a team where we're trying to introduce FP and reactive programming, and most of them have never heard of either one, or if they have, have never really used it.
          • 4y ago
  • SergeAx 4y ago
    Even better: you can just hire Android devs who are fed up with client side programming.
• jpgvm 4y ago
  Kotlin is actually booming in backend, especially in financial services/fintech. Most are converted Java programmers ofc but many are also new to the JVM coming from Ruby/Python/etc.
  • RockingGoodNite 4y ago
    No, it isn't, visit https://www.dice.com https://www.dice.com and enter kotlin into the search field. There are a few hundred total listed.
    • kyawzazaw 4y ago
      It isn’t booming per se. But it is taking a stronger foothold.
  • pjmlp 4y ago
    Kotlin is only booming on Android, due to Google force feeding it on the ecosystem. Its existence hardly matters on the JVM world.
• quickthrower2 4y ago
  You can hire devs for any $LANG ... just pay more, be a good place to work, and train people.
• nsonha 4y ago
  Kotlin devs are everywhere what are you talking about? These 2 are not even in the same tier when it comes to popularity.
• princevegeta89 4y ago
  Honestly Kotlin hasn't ever seemed to pick up that mainstream heat. It sounds like a weird choice to move to kotlin specifically for backend systems.
  • jansan 4y ago
    Given that Kotlin is basically Java with a lot of flaws removed, how is this not the natural choice for large backend systems?
    • yardstick 4y ago
      Inertia. See https://thecodest.co/blog/why-kotlin-is-awesome-but-you-will-stay-with-java-anyway-1 https://thecodest.co/blog/why-kotlin-is-awesome-but-you-will...
  • anta40 4y ago
    Not a backend dev. At least Spring officialy supports Kotlin since v5, and I see most Java devs (including myself) have little difficulties migrating to Kotlin. Scala or Clojure, on the other side, is more radically different.
  • jareds 4y ago
    What is the IDE support like in Kotlin? I've never had to look at it professionally. I use VSCode because it works much better with my screen reading software then IntelliJ. As far as I can tell to get a decent develop experience IntelliJ is your only option?
• bradlys 4y ago
  I had never used Kotlin before but picked it up day 1 of the job easily and was committing and pushing PRs immediately. There’s always a few gotchas with any language but Kotlin to me was basically JS/Python meets Java. Pretty trivial to get going - always some nuances to learn but contributing was trivial. I have no idea about Elixir but it doesn’t look as conventional.
• mvuksano 4y ago
  I'm surpised anyone would be hiring devs based on what language they use cureently. Any good enginner can learn a language quickly.
  • steve_adams_86 4y ago
    I suppose part of the concern is finding people who actually want to use your tech stack too, though. I interviewed a company a while back that was using elixir which I thought was cool, but I ended up not taking the job. Part of what worried me was realizing just how much they struggled to find interested candidates, and it seemed like they were willing to compromise to hire as a result. Perhaps I was a compromise, haha. The CTO and other devs on the team painted a bleak picture of building the team, and elixir seemed to be the main obstacle. The other issue they faced, though I doubt it was as much of an obstacle, was that they were working on pet insurance. That was a major deterrent for me. The compensation and working conditions were excellent though, so I suspect many people wouldn’t care and would gladly take the compensation and flexible work life – were it not for elixir. I found it surprising but I’ve seen people work on worse things for less money using more popular languages. Perhaps more people are afraid to learn something new than it seems.
    • phist_mcgee 4y ago
      A pet insurance company using a semi-obscure functional programming language. Definitely sounds like someone overspent their innovation tokens: https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology