8 ms·

I interviewed somewhere once and mentioned that I did some projects in Erlang and learned a bit about functional programming. The founder told me that functiona

I interviewed somewhere once and mentioned that I did some projects in Erlang and learned a bit about functional programming. The founder told me that functional programming is a joke and that I'm clearly a computer scientist and not an engineer, and told me he'd never hire me as an engineer. This was one of my first tech interviews after spending nights and weekends self-teaching. I only mentioned this at all because the dudes LinkedIn said he was involved with some Erlang orgs. Anyway, I did take a non-eng role there, and it was easily the worst and most abusive (like verbally abusive, psychological abusive, generally fucked up) places I've ever worked. Eventually i got my first engineering gig at a more humane company and have been doing great since I learned recently that the other company went to zero. Good riddance (though I am bummed for folks who lost their jobs)

victor9000 4y ago
I would just stress to folks that red flags go both ways. If the work environment seems toxic from your experience as a candidate, chances are it will only get worse once you join.
- scrame 4y ago
  That's not both ways. That's exactly what a red flag in interviewing means.
  - victor9000 4y ago
    Employers look for red flags in candidates, candidates should do the same. My apologies for confusing you.
Yoric 4y ago
I've recently had an interviewer tell me that "Erlang is an academic language" and promptly stop the conversation after that. That's in a company that was attempting to make distributed applications easier to write. This was both: - factually wrong; - a bright red flag that the company doesn't know their own domain as well as they think/claim; - a bright red flag that their scope is much more limited than what they claim in the job description. :shrug:
- jszymborski 4y ago
  "You wouldn't perchance know what the 'Er' in 'Erlang' is short for, would you?"
  - arthurcolle 4y ago
    Oooooh!! I know this one! Ericsson! Do I get a prize?
  - Yoric 4y ago
    I personally don't mind academic. However, part of my response was that Ericsson had been using it industrially since the 90s, and that in fact Erlang was actually less academic than Python or Go. The recruiter handwaved this as "well, it's an academic language".
- john-tells-all 4y ago
  You totally dodged a bullet. Even if the company despises Erlang for whatever reasons, it's still very valuable for them to examine and be educated about it. Erlang makes tradeoffs for X optimizing for Y, we'll choose a different tradeoff since we're optimizing for Z. Once I interviewed at a company with many competitors. I continually asked "how will this company succeed while the competitors have a ten year head start? What choices do we make that the others didn't?". I got blank stares. Literally nobody was interested in examining the competitive landscape.
  - Yoric 4y ago
    Oh, I've had that, too. I've interviewed with a few companies that create products that are literally years of research behind their (sometimes free) competitors. And don't realize, typically because they don't have the skill to even comprehend the difference. And for fun, all these companies interviewed me on cloud development, rather than on their core offering, despite the fact that I actually happen to know a thing or two about said branch (i.e. I have both a PhD and commercial experience in the domain).
- jononomo 4y ago
pmarreck 4y ago
1) "The founder told me that functional programming is a joke and that I'm clearly a computer scientist and not an engineer, and told me he'd never hire me as an engineer." This sort of person intends to sleep in the bed that they make, so best to leave them to it. On the other hand... 2) I'm an Elixir guy looking for work for a few months now. I've been applying to Ruby on Rails jobs where it makes sense (it was a thing I used to do). Should I be concerned that this is the perception out there? IS this the perception out there? I've heard this attitude from businesspeople in the past (such as from Brad Birnbaum, a former boss who is now at Kustomer; this was while I was at Desk.com) at times, "I don't want academics, I want builders". He said this to me repeatedly; in hindsight he was probably trying to signal to me that I was starting to look too academic. Notably, all of the apps that the businesspeople I've heard say that, are now shut down after being bought out (and Brad is now a bajillionaire after a Meta acquisition). Hmmmmmm. But I guess that was the plan all along: To build only good enough to last to a buyout.
- Yoric 4y ago
  I'd say that it's all in the eye of the beholder. Not so long ago, everything FP or reactive programming was considered academic. Heck, even virtual machines, garbage-collectors, threads or distributed programming were considered academic. These days, who doesn't use most of these bricks? Which means... sadly, it means that I have no clue what the future holds for Elixir, or Erlang, or any technology that is perhaps a bit too much in advance on its time.
  - namaria 4y ago
    I'm endlessly fascinated by the strong opinions people in software develop about tooling. I never saw it with such intensity anywhere else... I'd like to get more into that someday. Maybe because we use these tools with our minds so it's a very intimate thing. Maybe because people find hard to learn a set of tools due to so much of foundational knowledge behind it having been abstracted away so they develop mental defenses against other sets of tools as a rationalization of why they don't wanna lose the sunk cost...
    - 4y ago
Herval_freire 4y ago
What company. Worth avoiding.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> Anyway, I did take a non-eng role there, and it was easily the worst and most abusive (like verbally abusive, psychological abusive, generally fucked up) places I've ever worked. Sorry this happened, but it’s a good lesson for everyone: If interviewers do anything resembling “negging” in an interview, they’re trying to push your limits and see how submissive you’ll be. The founder may not have cared about Erlang. He just wanted something to attack you with. Some people think that lightly insulting people is a way to get them to work hard to prove their worth. It does work on people for a while, until they realize they’re being used and abused.
leke 4y ago
Is there something about Erlang itself that makes it an attractive FP language for you, or is it the environment (Beam, OTP)? As a web dev, I find the performance of the system and concept of the actor model appealing and interesting, although admittedly I lack an in-depth understanding. I found the language to be too high a barrier though. This includes Elixir. http://efene.org/ http://efene.org/ looked promising, but when I tried to install it, I had some issue with something being outdated. Gleam is the next thing to try, although the more I read about it the less I understand, lol.
- michaelcampbell 4y ago
  I've done some toy Elixir things and I really like it; not enough to get hired but enough to like the shiny packaging. (It might be that shiny all the way down, I just don't have the experience to say.) Gleam though... that looks more to my liking _syntax_ wise. Familiarity more than anything, but might try some toy stuff on it soon. BEAM interests me immensely from a user standpoint; I'm just wondering how much time it has in the world vs. containerization and orchestration. Haven't heard of efene yet; thanks for that. Now my Sunday's ruined =D
michaelcampbell 4y ago
> The founder told me that functional programming is a joke and that I'm clearly a computer scientist and not an engineer, and told me he'd never hire me as an engineer. Man, that would have left me with such a bad impression that I would have ended it right there, no matter the role. That said, I've taken jobs where I had to in order to eat, and at least one of them ended up being shit, so I empathise.
- vector_spaces 4y ago
  Yeah I almost cried partly because it was so unexpected, and partly because I was so desperate dealing with lots of housing instability, and this was one of the first companies that even reached out to me for an interview. I wish I had more of a spine back then because that ended up being hardly the worst of it In a way I'm glad to have gone through it -- I think it's helped me to be a lot more compassionate in situations when I have any kind of leverage over another person, and it taught me precisely all the wrong ways to treat people in general. Probably most significantly, it showed me that there are major costs in committing to fucked up people, costs that might not be obvious at first. Like you can think you're aware what you're getting yourself into, you can tell yourself it's just for a paycheck, but if they get inside your head at all, you might be dealing with that shit for years. And you can be sure that predators like that are all about getting inside your head

victor9000 4y ago

I would just stress to folks that red flags go both ways. If the work environment seems toxic from your experience as a candidate, chances are it will only get worse once you join.

scrame 4y ago
That's not both ways. That's exactly what a red flag in interviewing means.
- victor9000 4y ago
  Employers look for red flags in candidates, candidates should do the same. My apologies for confusing you.

Yoric 4y ago

I've recently had an interviewer tell me that "Erlang is an academic language" and promptly stop the conversation after that. That's in a company that was attempting to make distributed applications easier to write. This was both: - factually wrong; - a bright red flag that the company doesn't know their own domain as well as they think/claim; - a bright red flag that their scope is much more limited than what they claim in the job description. :shrug:

jszymborski 4y ago
"You wouldn't perchance know what the 'Er' in 'Erlang' is short for, would you?"
- arthurcolle 4y ago
  Oooooh!! I know this one! Ericsson! Do I get a prize?
- Yoric 4y ago
  I personally don't mind academic. However, part of my response was that Ericsson had been using it industrially since the 90s, and that in fact Erlang was actually less academic than Python or Go. The recruiter handwaved this as "well, it's an academic language".
john-tells-all 4y ago
You totally dodged a bullet. Even if the company despises Erlang for whatever reasons, it's still very valuable for them to examine and be educated about it. Erlang makes tradeoffs for X optimizing for Y, we'll choose a different tradeoff since we're optimizing for Z. Once I interviewed at a company with many competitors. I continually asked "how will this company succeed while the competitors have a ten year head start? What choices do we make that the others didn't?". I got blank stares. Literally nobody was interested in examining the competitive landscape.
- Yoric 4y ago
  Oh, I've had that, too. I've interviewed with a few companies that create products that are literally years of research behind their (sometimes free) competitors. And don't realize, typically because they don't have the skill to even comprehend the difference. And for fun, all these companies interviewed me on cloud development, rather than on their core offering, despite the fact that I actually happen to know a thing or two about said branch (i.e. I have both a PhD and commercial experience in the domain).
jononomo 4y ago

pmarreck 4y ago

1) "The founder told me that functional programming is a joke and that I'm clearly a computer scientist and not an engineer, and told me he'd never hire me as an engineer." This sort of person intends to sleep in the bed that they make, so best to leave them to it. On the other hand... 2) I'm an Elixir guy looking for work for a few months now. I've been applying to Ruby on Rails jobs where it makes sense (it was a thing I used to do). Should I be concerned that this is the perception out there? IS this the perception out there? I've heard this attitude from businesspeople in the past (such as from Brad Birnbaum, a former boss who is now at Kustomer; this was while I was at Desk.com) at times, "I don't want academics, I want builders". He said this to me repeatedly; in hindsight he was probably trying to signal to me that I was starting to look too academic. Notably, all of the apps that the businesspeople I've heard say that, are now shut down after being bought out (and Brad is now a bajillionaire after a Meta acquisition). Hmmmmmm. But I guess that was the plan all along: To build only good enough to last to a buyout.

Yoric 4y ago
I'd say that it's all in the eye of the beholder. Not so long ago, everything FP or reactive programming was considered academic. Heck, even virtual machines, garbage-collectors, threads or distributed programming were considered academic. These days, who doesn't use most of these bricks? Which means... sadly, it means that I have no clue what the future holds for Elixir, or Erlang, or any technology that is perhaps a bit too much in advance on its time.
- namaria 4y ago
  I'm endlessly fascinated by the strong opinions people in software develop about tooling. I never saw it with such intensity anywhere else... I'd like to get more into that someday. Maybe because we use these tools with our minds so it's a very intimate thing. Maybe because people find hard to learn a set of tools due to so much of foundational knowledge behind it having been abstracted away so they develop mental defenses against other sets of tools as a rationalization of why they don't wanna lose the sunk cost...
  - 4y ago

Herval_freire 4y ago

What company. Worth avoiding.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> Anyway, I did take a non-eng role there, and it was easily the worst and most abusive (like verbally abusive, psychological abusive, generally fucked up) places I've ever worked. Sorry this happened, but it’s a good lesson for everyone: If interviewers do anything resembling “negging” in an interview, they’re trying to push your limits and see how submissive you’ll be. The founder may not have cared about Erlang. He just wanted something to attack you with. Some people think that lightly insulting people is a way to get them to work hard to prove their worth. It does work on people for a while, until they realize they’re being used and abused.

leke 4y ago

Is there something about Erlang itself that makes it an attractive FP language for you, or is it the environment (Beam, OTP)? As a web dev, I find the performance of the system and concept of the actor model appealing and interesting, although admittedly I lack an in-depth understanding. I found the language to be too high a barrier though. This includes Elixir. http://efene.org/ http://efene.org/ looked promising, but when I tried to install it, I had some issue with something being outdated. Gleam is the next thing to try, although the more I read about it the less I understand, lol.

michaelcampbell 4y ago
I've done some toy Elixir things and I really like it; not enough to get hired but enough to like the shiny packaging. (It might be that shiny all the way down, I just don't have the experience to say.) Gleam though... that looks more to my liking _syntax_ wise. Familiarity more than anything, but might try some toy stuff on it soon. BEAM interests me immensely from a user standpoint; I'm just wondering how much time it has in the world vs. containerization and orchestration. Haven't heard of efene yet; thanks for that. Now my Sunday's ruined =D

michaelcampbell 4y ago

> The founder told me that functional programming is a joke and that I'm clearly a computer scientist and not an engineer, and told me he'd never hire me as an engineer. Man, that would have left me with such a bad impression that I would have ended it right there, no matter the role. That said, I've taken jobs where I had to in order to eat, and at least one of them ended up being shit, so I empathise.

vector_spaces 4y ago
Yeah I almost cried partly because it was so unexpected, and partly because I was so desperate dealing with lots of housing instability, and this was one of the first companies that even reached out to me for an interview. I wish I had more of a spine back then because that ended up being hardly the worst of it In a way I'm glad to have gone through it -- I think it's helped me to be a lot more compassionate in situations when I have any kind of leverage over another person, and it taught me precisely all the wrong ways to treat people in general. Probably most significantly, it showed me that there are major costs in committing to fucked up people, costs that might not be obvious at first. Like you can think you're aware what you're getting yourself into, you can tell yourself it's just for a paycheck, but if they get inside your head at all, you might be dealing with that shit for years. And you can be sure that predators like that are all about getting inside your head