3 ms·

Goodluck finding Erlang devs when your core dev team finds a new job.

by dota168 12y ago

MCRed 12y ago
FWIW, we built a team of Elixir developers in the spring of 2014 in Austin Texas. Austin is not the bay area, it's maybe a Tier 3 startup town. And still we were able to build a great team over the course of a few months. At the time, Elixir had not hit 1.0 and while there's a lot of overlap between elixir and erlang this is a good comparison because Elixir is a lot less common than erlang. Here's the thing-- by having that filter of using this language-- a good language-- we self selected for good engineers because the good engineers were either already using it or were very interested in it. I for one, for instance, came to that job, relocating across the country just because I wanted to work in that language.
- stephenbez 12y ago
  What company is it?
rubyrescue 12y ago
it's really easy to train someone on Erlang. And there are an increasing number of Erlang devs these days.
toast0 12y ago
I learned Erlang on the job when I started at an Erlang shop, in between taking care of existing php stuff. It's not super hard: the syntax is weird, but at least whitespace isn't significant.
taybin 12y ago
Who wants to hire some 'wah, syntax is hard' programmers?
rdtsc 12y ago
Still better than sifting through hoards of mediocre Java programmers.
GrinningFool 12y ago
There seems to be a pervasive sentiment that developers can't learn erlang. There is a learning curve, and you're going to want to seed your staff with expertise (it sounds like bet365 did this), but there's no reason that a competent developer can't learn this or any other functional language. And given the increasing usage of Erlang, it's a good skill to pick up - so if you have the opportunity to learn it as part of a job you already have, so much the better.
- rdtsc 12y ago
  Yap, beware of the person who can't type a "." instead of a ";" If syntax is their main complaint, chances are, they'll fall face first handling distributed code or supervision hierarchies.
lewaldman 12y ago
As far as I remember one of the Erlang design goals was to build a language that could be taught and learnt really quickly.

Goodluck finding Erlang devs when your core dev team finds a new job.

by dota168 12y ago

Goodluck finding Erlang devs when your core dev team finds a new job.

MCRed 12y ago

FWIW, we built a team of Elixir developers in the spring of 2014 in Austin Texas. Austin is not the bay area, it's maybe a Tier 3 startup town. And still we were able to build a great team over the course of a few months. At the time, Elixir had not hit 1.0 and while there's a lot of overlap between elixir and erlang this is a good comparison because Elixir is a lot less common than erlang. Here's the thing-- by having that filter of using this language-- a good language-- we self selected for good engineers because the good engineers were either already using it or were very interested in it. I for one, for instance, came to that job, relocating across the country just because I wanted to work in that language.

stephenbez 12y ago
What company is it?

rubyrescue 12y ago

it's really easy to train someone on Erlang. And there are an increasing number of Erlang devs these days.

toast0 12y ago

I learned Erlang on the job when I started at an Erlang shop, in between taking care of existing php stuff. It's not super hard: the syntax is weird, but at least whitespace isn't significant.

taybin 12y ago

Who wants to hire some 'wah, syntax is hard' programmers?

rdtsc 12y ago

Still better than sifting through hoards of mediocre Java programmers.

GrinningFool 12y ago

There seems to be a pervasive sentiment that developers can't learn erlang. There is a learning curve, and you're going to want to seed your staff with expertise (it sounds like bet365 did this), but there's no reason that a competent developer can't learn this or any other functional language. And given the increasing usage of Erlang, it's a good skill to pick up - so if you have the opportunity to learn it as part of a job you already have, so much the better.

rdtsc 12y ago
Yap, beware of the person who can't type a "." instead of a ";" If syntax is their main complaint, chances are, they'll fall face first handling distributed code or supervision hierarchies.

lewaldman 12y ago

As far as I remember one of the Erlang design goals was to build a language that could be taught and learnt really quickly.