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Talk to some engineering managers. Their concerns are hiring people to get the job done. You can't easily hire devs for obscure languages like Erlang and Elix

Talk to some engineering managers. Their concerns are hiring people to get the job done. You can't easily hire devs for obscure languages like Erlang and Elixir. If you can find any that are looking for a gig they want too much money. On the contrary, if you are hiring for C++/C#/Java/JS/TS your problem is separating good from bad candidates but good ones are available. Likewise, most devs don't want to learn an obscure language for one job even if they are more than capable. Either they get stuck doing that language or they earn a hole in their resume instead of additional experience in what future employers care about. Finally, the vast majority of applications and systems don't need ultra high reliability and don't have the budget for it. It isn't clear that downtime impedes success for anything but the most critical businesses.

int_19h 1y ago
> Likewise, most devs don't want to learn an obscure language for one job even if they are more than capable. Either they get stuck doing that language or they earn a hole in their resume instead of additional experience in what future employers care about. This is less of an issue with accumulated experience. Personally I would actually welcome the kind of job that would involve learning a new niche language, since I already have >10 years of experience in several mainstream languages, and there's diminishing returns wrt resumes and interviews past this point.
zelphirkalt 1y ago
I mean, if you learned Erlang on the job to build reliable systems with it, you don't have to put an "obscure" language on your resume. You can put "highly fault tolerant systems" on your resume, and when asked about it in an interview, you got the chops to back that claim up, while many other people don't. It is very far from a "hole" in ones CV. Any engineer worth their salt in a hiring process will recognize this. It is a matter of learning new things, instead of repeating the same experience of some NodeJS or Java CRUD over and over again. If I was in hiring work, and I met someone with that kind of Erlang experience, I would hope I can hire them, and that they will not be too expensive for me. I would set them to work on the interaction between the system parts and let them work on reliability and latency stuff. It is a matter of someone having the same 2 years of experience over and over again, or someone learning many things. Personally I would welcome a chance to learn more Erlang on the job and build something with it. Unfortunately, businesses want the fresh graduate with 10y of work experience, who already knows their complete stack. Maybe not so much in the Erlang world, but in general. Learning on the job?? Pah! You already ought to know! Just another reason to pay less! And Erlang jobs are rare. I am between jobs, so if someone happens to know a remote job, where I could start working and learn more Erlang (have only looked at the beginning of "Learn you some Erlang for great Good"), please let me know. I would be happy to have that "hole" as part of my CV :D
- lelanthran 1y ago
  > Any engineer worth their salt in a hiring process will recognize this. Sure, agreed, but you aren't even going to get to the point of an engineer recognising this because you'll fail the gauntlet of HR with it's tick-boxes for tech stacks. You could be extremely battle-hardened on fault-tolerant distributed systems from being the the Erlang trenches for the last 3 years, but because they HR person couldn't tick-off one of "Node.js", "Java", "C#/.Net" or "Python", your application won't ever be seen by an engineer.
  - zelphirkalt 1y ago
    OK, I get your point. Though in my case, of course I also know Java and Python. That's the children's toys. I have developed whole desktop applications in Java and have worked with Python for several years. Those things are not "USPs" or distinguishing at all. Many people know them.
pdimitar 1y ago
Well I'm a senior looking for an Elixir job. What constitutes "wanting too much money" btw? Really curious.

int_19h 1y ago

> Likewise, most devs don't want to learn an obscure language for one job even if they are more than capable. Either they get stuck doing that language or they earn a hole in their resume instead of additional experience in what future employers care about. This is less of an issue with accumulated experience. Personally I would actually welcome the kind of job that would involve learning a new niche language, since I already have >10 years of experience in several mainstream languages, and there's diminishing returns wrt resumes and interviews past this point.

zelphirkalt 1y ago

I mean, if you learned Erlang on the job to build reliable systems with it, you don't have to put an "obscure" language on your resume. You can put "highly fault tolerant systems" on your resume, and when asked about it in an interview, you got the chops to back that claim up, while many other people don't. It is very far from a "hole" in ones CV. Any engineer worth their salt in a hiring process will recognize this. It is a matter of learning new things, instead of repeating the same experience of some NodeJS or Java CRUD over and over again. If I was in hiring work, and I met someone with that kind of Erlang experience, I would hope I can hire them, and that they will not be too expensive for me. I would set them to work on the interaction between the system parts and let them work on reliability and latency stuff. It is a matter of someone having the same 2 years of experience over and over again, or someone learning many things. Personally I would welcome a chance to learn more Erlang on the job and build something with it. Unfortunately, businesses want the fresh graduate with 10y of work experience, who already knows their complete stack. Maybe not so much in the Erlang world, but in general. Learning on the job?? Pah! You already ought to know! Just another reason to pay less! And Erlang jobs are rare. I am between jobs, so if someone happens to know a remote job, where I could start working and learn more Erlang (have only looked at the beginning of "Learn you some Erlang for great Good"), please let me know. I would be happy to have that "hole" as part of my CV :D

lelanthran 1y ago
> Any engineer worth their salt in a hiring process will recognize this. Sure, agreed, but you aren't even going to get to the point of an engineer recognising this because you'll fail the gauntlet of HR with it's tick-boxes for tech stacks. You could be extremely battle-hardened on fault-tolerant distributed systems from being the the Erlang trenches for the last 3 years, but because they HR person couldn't tick-off one of "Node.js", "Java", "C#/.Net" or "Python", your application won't ever be seen by an engineer.
- zelphirkalt 1y ago
  OK, I get your point. Though in my case, of course I also know Java and Python. That's the children's toys. I have developed whole desktop applications in Java and have worked with Python for several years. Those things are not "USPs" or distinguishing at all. Many people know them.

pdimitar 1y ago

Well I'm a senior looking for an Elixir job. What constitutes "wanting too much money" btw? Really curious.