4 ms·

>A few months ago I started a new job at a company that uses Elixir as its main language >I've never written a line of Elixir or Erlang before in my life How

>A few months ago I started a new job at a company that uses Elixir as its main language >I've never written a line of Elixir or Erlang before in my life How is this possible?

jacquesm 3y ago
It's possible because the number of programmers that have been exposed to Erlang and Elixir is a very small fraction of the total. Besides, many programmers go through their whole career in a single eco-system (.NET, Java, C, C++, COBOL, PHP etc).
- sBqQu3U0wH 3y ago
  Hmm, I was dabbling with Elixir for quite some time now, but never considered myself proficient enough for applying to Elixir jobs. May be worth a try.
dbbk 3y ago
My company hires non-Elixir developers for Elixir roles too. The candidates with experience are just far too hard to find.
ch4s3 3y ago
I've hired a number of people to write Elixr who were skilled and eager but hadn't used it before.
toast0 3y ago
Some companies have sanity in hiring? I've been hired to work in Erlang without experience (although I got typecast into php stuff because I did have experience) and although the company was dependent on Erlang, we almost never hired anyone with Erlang experience. Hire smart people that are comfortable learning new things, have a project where the strength of BEAM is compelling, buy a bunch of Erlang books. My current job is mostly Rust and I didn't know that before I started either. And seems like the team is similar. Smaller team, so I don't know have confidence in my likely to know Rust estimate. The pool of people who are looking for a new job, and are experienced in Erlang/Elixir, and have exposure to the business specialization, and want to work for a company is very small and hard to find. Hiring companies can ask for it, but they'll have to compromise. It almost certainly doesn't hurt to apply to a job where you don't meet the stated requirements; there's likely no real penalty for having your resume tossed out, and that happens with qualified resumes too. At worst, maybe they blacklist you and won't look at your resume again ever; that's probably ok. Same thing goes the other way, I'd have preferred an opportunity to use more Erlang, but I didn't find one that met my other needs, so I compromised and write Rust in a cloudy environment and dream about using BEAM and dist and hotloading and all that. Maybe one day.

>A few months ago I started a new job at a company that uses Elixir as its main language >I've never written a line of Elixir or Erlang before in my life How is this possible?

jacquesm 3y ago

It's possible because the number of programmers that have been exposed to Erlang and Elixir is a very small fraction of the total. Besides, many programmers go through their whole career in a single eco-system (.NET, Java, C, C++, COBOL, PHP etc).

sBqQu3U0wH 3y ago
Hmm, I was dabbling with Elixir for quite some time now, but never considered myself proficient enough for applying to Elixir jobs. May be worth a try.

dbbk 3y ago

My company hires non-Elixir developers for Elixir roles too. The candidates with experience are just far too hard to find.

ch4s3 3y ago

I've hired a number of people to write Elixr who were skilled and eager but hadn't used it before.

toast0 3y ago

Some companies have sanity in hiring? I've been hired to work in Erlang without experience (although I got typecast into php stuff because I did have experience) and although the company was dependent on Erlang, we almost never hired anyone with Erlang experience. Hire smart people that are comfortable learning new things, have a project where the strength of BEAM is compelling, buy a bunch of Erlang books. My current job is mostly Rust and I didn't know that before I started either. And seems like the team is similar. Smaller team, so I don't know have confidence in my likely to know Rust estimate. The pool of people who are looking for a new job, and are experienced in Erlang/Elixir, and have exposure to the business specialization, and want to work for a company is very small and hard to find. Hiring companies can ask for it, but they'll have to compromise. It almost certainly doesn't hurt to apply to a job where you don't meet the stated requirements; there's likely no real penalty for having your resume tossed out, and that happens with qualified resumes too. At worst, maybe they blacklist you and won't look at your resume again ever; that's probably ok. Same thing goes the other way, I'd have preferred an opportunity to use more Erlang, but I didn't find one that met my other needs, so I compromised and write Rust in a cloudy environment and dream about using BEAM and dist and hotloading and all that. Maybe one day.