Currently I am a JS dev, and not enjoying it at all. I looked at Elixir and Crystal, like both. But I am open to learning anything that is unlike JS at this point. How is the job market like?
However, the most important part is that Clojure is a very powerful piece of technology that made me reevaluate what software engineering really is.
You can efficiently use Clojure for both backend and frontend with easy access to libraries from JVM and npm so you will never run into the problem, common in other niche langs, of too few libraries.
Nevertheless, Clojure's own ecosystem is filled with many great, cutting-edge ideas that you wouldn't find working so well elsewhere. The community is very welcoming, growing and diverse with people coming from all different programming backgrounds - all sharing the disillusionment with other programming languages and determination to find and build a better way.
I love clojure, and would love a clojure job, BUT my hesitation comes from the companies choosing clojure or any niche language. Choosing a niche language seems like a very risky move, to me. My fear is that that its a small company and someone senior and technical (CTO?) just wants to have fun in a new cool language because they are bored.
Don't get me wrong, I also want to have fun in a new cool language because I'm bored, but that's not a good decision for a company to pick that as a tool.
Anyway, I'm worried that the culture is not entirely practical in their technical decisions, and that's my hesitation.
You may be right about many companies’ decisions, but I will say that Clojure is a very practical language. I think you’d just need to ask them why they chose it, and decide for yourself if you think it was a wise decision.
I understand your worry, but I've had a quite opposite take on this.
I think we can agree that it's not that hard to find ANY job as an experienced developer. However it's much more difficult to find a great, satisfying job. For that you need to navigate around a lot of corpo-bullshit type of projects, and Clojure has served me well as a useful filter in doing that.
My reasoning is that Clojure is niche enough that when company is using it, you can assume that it's due to a deliberate technical choice, and not just because of its popularity. That tells me two things that are symptomatic, in my opinion, of a healthy tech company culture:
- tech decisions are made by engineers, not by top-level executives,
- their conclusions and bets align with mine because we all see and agree on Clojure's edge over more popular solutions.
Admittedly, there's always a risk that someone just followed the hype and got out of their depth but I think this risk is relatively small, because Clojure's no longer a new kid on a block and choosing a tech stack is a major decision and usually done by senior tech leadership, hopefully less hype driven.
Of course, Clojure is no silver bullet and it's just a tool that gives you enough rope to hang yourself. Messy codebases are just as possible as in other languages, especially when the team is new to lisps that are very different from mainstream languages, but that's a nature of software development - you learn with the experience. I do cringe when I look at the Clojure code I wrote when I was just starting and wasn't fully grasping Clojure's way of thinking, but the more I use it, the more I come to appreciate how powerful it is.
Having said that, no software project is ever complete and so isn't Clojure as an ecosystem. The tooling is constantly evolving and new patterns are emerging. What's great about Clojure open-source community is that everyone seems to share the desire to harness complexity and Rich Hickey has convinced each one of us at some point that the way to do it is through simplicity https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/
Even within Clojure's community there's a diversity of approaches, and I think it's necessary to improve and evolve. The more recent trend, I've noticed is that the community is converging at Data Oriented Programming that's applicable in other languages as well, but has always been at the core of Clojure's mindset that is especially well suited for it.
Moreover, Clojure has already grown past the threshold of being just a niche toy and has sufficiently big market that it won't die off anytime soon. When you study history of programming languages, you'll notice that it's enormously difficult thing to do for an emerging player, especially without big corporate backing. And Clojure is as grassroot as it gets: https://clojure.org/about/history
I can second this. I've worked in the industry in academia, enterprise and industrial. Switching to Clojure not only has me at my highest salary ever, but I'm consistently working with some of the best people I've met in my entire career. The community is incredible, the job market is open and the people who seem to be attracted to the ecosystem are fantastic engineers and generally great people.
30 years as a professional dev, and I've never been happier.
The SO chart shows Erlang is actually highest at $120K salary. Also note the median years of experience is 13. Making $110K after 13 years is not all that great. The chart would be more useful if it showed a trajectory over time for each language. Overall I don’t think this chart should influence anyone’s decision to pick a programming language.
I worked with a few teams using Clojure and there was nothing magical about it. One of the Clojure teams’ API was very thoughtfully done and reliable. Another Clojure team s’ API was a mess and caused loads of issues. I suspect the first team chose Clojure organically and the second team picked it due the SO salary.
The problem is that learning a niche language like Clojure should demand a higher salary but it doesn't. Companies realize they can get an existing experienced developer to learn it. It's also not wise to jump ship to a niche language like this unless you really have the funding for it and even then, the talent pool is much smaller and you find yourself its not an employers market in that niche.
So as a business owner by choosing clojure:
- I can't afford to lose experienced clojure devs but my budget is fixed
- I am going to be constantly requiring onboarding, training existing non-clojure devs
- I simply cannot reverse this decision.
To me the third point is the biggest risk but back to your point, it can become unmanageable unless you have the best and the brightest.
In any other language, you could still operate the business with middle of the pack but with these niche languages the risks are just much higher. It would require a Product Manager or even a CTO with extensive clojure background and those would be even harder to find and keep.
Like the SO survey shows, not everybody is willing to pay top dollars for a clojure dev and this should make anyone pause before jumping into it.
I personally liked clojure but the tooling was still painful like working with Java. Readability wise its a nightmare and if your entire team quits, there is a very good chance your business will fail, as it is that much harder to scale up your team or find experienced talent who now feel they are owed a much higher wages (which they should).
Nim on the other hand is more promising. It doesn't have any radical shifts, it still reads like Python and its very fast. But it doesn't even show up in the SO survey which makes me think its far too early.
I was one of the few professional F# devs at a time when F# was ranked #1 in pay (though that wasn't why I used F#). Spoiler alert: The pay difference is not large enough to be worth making a career decision off of. Use the languages you are the most happy with. Niche languages that get paid well don't seem to have a steady spot on the list.
You can't get paid the big bucks if you get forced out of a job for poor performance, and in this economy, expect that to be a real risk.
You can specify the location - the salaries are more inline with what you'd expect if you select the USA. Also note that 8,540 of 37,546 respondents are from the US - so MOST of this data is not relevant to the USA.
Almost any other western country other than the US and Switzerland will massively pull down the average. Especially in the US salaries are extremely inflated. I know academics in physics who are effectively chained to the US because they are so used to the huge amount of money. In Germany for example you cannot expect to make more than 70k euro max, probably more like 50-55k euro a year even as a senior software engineer. I don't think a lot of americans appreciate how vastly inflated american wages are
Ok, having recently worked in Germany its a bit overexaggerated. I think now, senior engineers can be reaching 80-110k quite easily. Secondly, american wages are not inflated but are high due to original demand being in US.
In Europe, good money is in contracting. For senior devs, salaried jobs are for people who for some reason won't switch to contracts (e.g. they're immigrants and need a full time job for visa purposes)
I didn't spell it wrong, you are suggesting a different idea. Own up to it rather than using a lame linguistic deflection tactic.
It is beyond fair compensation, because the standard of living is fine in Europe, even though I know a lot of americans think we live in squalor. The pay in the US is beyond what can possibly be expected in other developed countries.
You'd be singing a different tune if you were a US citizen with our complete lack of socialized safety net, inadequate health care system, etc etc.
I'm sorry as a non-US citizen that you're so poorly compensated, but clearly the market and corporations can afford to pay much better than they do in Europe.
The US spends a larger share of its GDP on its social safety net than Canada does.
What you're confused about is the difference between what a nation spends and what it gets for that spending. The US doesn't lack a social safety net, it has exceptionally incompetent government systems at the state and federal level while simultaneously spending a very large sum on its mediocre social safety net. US Government systems spend like European welfare states and the US doesn't get the same results from that spending.
If the poorest 1/4 of the population being covered by wildly expensive (for the taxpayer), free healthcare isn't part of a social safety net, then what qualifies exactly?
EBT (free food for the poor, aka food stamps) and Housing First are two other prominent social safety net programs. The US spends an enormous amount of money on EBT ($111b just at the federal level for 2021). The US housing first program was so successful it brought the US homelessness rate down to approximately where France and Canada are at.
Social Security and Medicare are social safety net programs, and the two largest by cost in world history. Neither program pays for itself properly, it's subsidized by taxpayers (and more so by the day).
The US also has a large incompetent population, compared to Europe. Europe only recently got a huge surge of under-skilled refugees, and this should weigh down on the system (some countries like Italy/Spain are already near bankruptcy).
The US also spends a lot on its military, which is part of the social safety net. Europe ignored military for other expenses and is now paying heavily for it.
That being said, the US does not make good use of its resources. But it's a much harder problem that you'd expect.
If I as an Engineer bring in $1M to the company in a year, and I make $50k a year. Where did that other $950k go? Sure there is some overhead: taxes, hr, accounting, management, etc. But the fact is that in the US engineers are currently just getting more of the share of value that their labor created. European developers should be fighting tooth and nail to get more.
How do you quantify that $1M? What about the product manager, designer, and QA person that were involved in the features you coded? What about the account manager and customer support rep that will now need to provide on-going support for your code?
You are thinking about market incorrectly. Thinking you have created 1M value for the company is a bit silly. Your work has this value only within context of that company, otherwise just take it away and enjoy the profits.
You are describing Marxism, but we live in a capitalist society, where it is seen as okay for companies to make a profit. Also, this is basically just victim blaming. I’m not saying it’s right that highly skilled people are paid so much less outside of the US, I’m simply pointing it out, because a lot of people don’t realise it. There are a lot of Americans who move to Europe and are shocked at how little they are compensated. Americans should be aware of this before moving, and so they can also get a global picture of wages
How is it fair to only compare raw salary numbers? There is nearly zero safety net in the U.S. Two weeks paid leave at best, you're expected to work long hours, healthcare is a mess... Compared to Western Europe, where there is affordable healthcare, saner labor practices etc.
1. That totally depends on the country. The social safety net in the UK is not great for example, and the NHS is barely functional
2. Social safety net isn’t required for a tech worker who makes such huge amounts, and their cost of living is not greater enough to make up the difference
I have no idea why, but it seems like software engineering salaries in the UK (from what I've seen in job listings for remote work as an American) are near the lowest in the first world (yes, even when adjusting for GBP/USD exchange rate).
In my experience the job market just revolves around business needs combined with transferrable skills for an affordable price.
Most business needs are a cheap version of CRUD+Business Rules.
As a result, the biggest languages (keep in mind that most businesses have large amounts of existing code) are also relatively old (except Go, C# and Swift which are relatively young).
Languages I see with my current clients and have seen with former clients and employers (medium to large organisations):
- Java (Including Scala, Kotlin and Groovy)
- C and C++ (usually both are found at the same company)
- Python
- JavaScript (including TypeScript)
- Web stuff like HTML and CSS (but that's mostly generated now)
- Go
- Swift (and Objective-C, mostly iOS development, some tvOS and macOS)
- C# be it modern or some classic ASP.NET
- A bunch of application-specific languages, Apex/PL-SQL/TSQL/X++
Besides "we already have it" there is the hiring pool problem. If you need to find someone for one of the above languages, the pools are generally big and available enough to find a suitable candidate in a month or two. And as such, if someone leaves you know you'll be able to replace hem.
If a platform or application demands a specific language, that's used, but otherwise it's all just availability of people and institutional knowledge.
For your specific languages you might be able to find work at niche sectors like telecom appliance manufacturers, defense or academic institutions.
Edit: and Rust, which like Go, is young (but even younger) yet gaining quite some traction. Also forgot Python for a second there.
Oh, that's right, I knew I forgot one! It's even gaining traction in ML for some reason, we've been using it in an image processing pipeline because performance and safety-wise it simply had the best results.
Edit: I even forgot to list Python. Maybe I should just look up some language popularity list and use that instead.
For Rust and ML, are the tooling libraries available to any quantity in Rust that are present in Python? I was under the impression Python has such an advance runaway any other languages will be hard to catchup (eg: Go has been trying, R <ugh>, etc)
The most comprehensive current view of the Rust machine learning ecosystem at the moment is probably at https://www.arewelearningyet.com/ (I sometimes help maintain this site)
Rust has a weird mix at the moment, and not one that's likely to significantly change within the next 12 months, at least. Certain tools are genuinely best-in-class, especially around simple operations on insane amounts of data. Rust kills it in that space due to its native speed and focus on concurrency.
There's also growing projects like Linfa [1]. that while not at the level of scikit-learn, have significantly increased their coverage on common data science/classical ML problems in the past couple years, along with improved tooling. The space does have a few pure-Rust projects coming down the pipeline around autodifferentiation, GPU compute, etc. that are likely to yield some really valuable results in deep learning, but that aren't quite available and will take some time to pick up some traction even once they're released. At the same time, areas like data visualization are unlikely to reach parity with something like matplotlib/pyplot in the near future.
Python is the de-facto standard, and will be for some time, but Rust's ability to build accessible high-level APIs on top of performant, language-native libraries is attracting some attention and I wouldn't be surprised to start seeing ingress in the certain areas over the next few years, where instead of the Python/C++ combination, it's just Rust all the way down.
There are obviously fewer ML libraries than for Python (sometimes worse quality, sometimes better), but if you are willing to invest time, it's definitely doable. E.g. I made a multi-task transformer-based syntax annotator in Rust using the tch Torch binding:
In my current job I do NLP with Python, Cython, and some C++. I don't think implementing ML stuff in Rust was much more work. Once you are beyond the stage of implementing a small research project or toy model, most systems are going to contain a lot of custom, specialized code. You will have to do that work in any language.
You may not like R (and I do totally understand that), but it's probably ahead of Python in specialised statistical (i.e. non unstructured ML) tools and packages.
Python is definitely better if you want to interact with a GPU and/or do "modern ML" (i.e. neural nets).
The ugh was a personal comment. I learned programming OO style (C++) and can go as far as scripted - but R seems like a Math professor went on an acid trip and made a language.
A lot of it's legacy but there's a lot of C/C++ out there. So something that can be used as a system-level language and that also (for the most part) has memory safety is going to be of interest to quite a few people even if they have to learn a new language.
Weird. I don’t see a lot of pure CRUD in enterprise development. It’s almost all dumb data transformation. Take data off a queue, add/remove/change, drop it in a db, pass it along.
Maybe take “REST” requests for reads or POST instead of dropping on another queue/topic.
Legacy code is C/C++ and PL/SQL. Java since 1.6 or so. JS/TypeScript now for frontends.
And a ton of RPC being called a REST API.
Python is exploding for all the ML/analytics being introduced. But that’s really it’s own thing. Doesn’t read like Python in any other domain. Just a wrapper around math libraries.
Generated as in, templated once and then just spit out via classic MVC and beyond (like API on the server, JS on the client which uses some MVVM construction for component rendering).
I’ve been working at a job that uses exclusively Elixir for backend work, for 100+ engineers. I’ve gotten multiple messages on LinkedIn from recruiters from other companies that also use Elixir. So I can’t speak about those other languages, but the Elixir job market is strong.
Seems like there’s a lot of listings if you just Google “elixir jobs.” There are also a few dedicated sites such as https://elixirjobs.net/
As an active community participant and freelance Elixir dev I've been dipping my toe in helping companies recruit Elixir devs and helping devs find good Elixir jobs. There is more of both parties than I could possibly address and exhaust. All the elixir devs I know with experience are thriving.
It is a niche and I find it a healthy one, significant and growing. If anyone wants to get into Elixir I'm happy to give it a whirl. My site has my contact info.
If you get a kick out of neat technology then you should be able to build your own cool stuff — libraries, tools, and the like — without needing to reach for a particular language.
I work on a large and boring Python codebase and I don’t need niche technologies to scratch my CS / hacker itches — healing technical debt with carefully considered redesigns that delete thousands of lines of code and produce v2 of something with 10x the usefulness is what gets me excited about work.
Do you like cooking, and have you heard of Keith Floyd? He was famous in the 1980s for pioneering the travel cooking TV show, getting out of the studio and cooking on location in borrowed kitchens of French farmers, fisherman’s galleys,
firesides in the outdoors as well as whichever corner of a professional kitchen he could
beg or borrow. He brought French cuisine to life, on screen in situ, by working with what he had available to him and making of it what he could, all with good humour and excellent results.
It’s a nice metaphor for producing business results no matter what kind of facilities you have available:
Non-existent to a close approximation (maybe more Elixir stuff out there than the others you listed but still very rare). Learn those languages if you’re interested and curious but if the goal is to get a job with a new to you language, stay as far away as possible from them. Not only are there very few jobs but also the niche languages will distract you from learning stuff that’s in demand.
The total amount of supply doesn't matter much. What matters (both for the employer and the job-seeker) is the ratio of supply to demand.
E.g., let's say JavaScript has the most demand of any language and there are 2 zillion job openings. This sounds great for job seekers initially, but what if there are 5 zillion JS devs seeking jobs? In that case job hunting might be very difficult. Similarly if there are 100 remote positions open in Pony, but only 10 Pony devs available to fill them, job hunting might not be so difficult.
There are some liquidity advantages in absolute scale, but for the most part it's the ratio of supply to demand that matters and not the raw numbers.
If you pick niche for niche, sure. If you pick niche as you think its better aligned to your workflow then you get a free filter as the companies are far more likely to be aligned to your "workflow".
What if I don’t want to work remotely? What if I’m not in the US, or what if I’m in Colorado? What if all the jobs are in an industry I would prefer not to work in or am morally opposed to? If there are 2 zillion positions available, there’s a much larger chance to find something in my area and meeting all my requirements/wishes. But if there are just 100 jobs, I might end up without a job, or with a job I’m not very happy about.
> What if I don’t want to work remotely? What if I’m not in the US, or what if I’m in Colorado? What if all the jobs are in an industry I would prefer not to work in or am morally opposed to? If there are 2 zillion positions available, there’s a much larger chance to find something in my area and meeting all my requirements/wishes. But if there are just 100 jobs, I might end up without a job, or with a job I’m not very happy about.
Yup, there's a better chance that ten of those 2 zillion positions will be in Colorado. But there's also an equal chance that 25 of those 5 zillion other candidates will.
Again, this is missing the importance of the ratio of supply to demand.
> If there are 2 zillion positions available, there’s a much larger chance to find something in my area and meeting all my requirements/wishes. But if there are just 100 jobs, I might end up without a job, or with a job I’m not very happy about.
If there are 5 zillion candidates seeking those 2 zillion positions, it's a much smaller chance you'll get one you want. You might end up without a job, or with a job you're not very happy about.
I don't see how this follows. There are many orders of magnitude of companies I would like to work for that use JS, than those which use Elixir. Many more openings per day, in many different places.
Restaurant A has 10 seats and 5 customers who just bought a meal and want to dine there.
Restaurant B has 20 seats and 50 customers who just bought a meal and want to dine there.
Which will be easier for you to get a seat in? The answer is Restaurant A, even though it has a smaller supply of seats. This is because supply and demand both matter!
If you go looking for elixir stuff it’s there, and it seems like its usage in industry is expanding at a steady pace. IMO this is because it’s a reasonably approachable language designed to solve a common difficult problem (high concurrency, fault tolerance at scale)
I’ve had 4 engineering jobs in 5.5 years. Two have been Elm/Haskell jobs. It took a couple of months of light searching to find my current Elm/Haskell job.
Setup alerts on job sites, join appropriate subreddits, Slack teams, Discord servers, language-specific job sites, etc. You will find a lot more jobs than you might expect.
Slacks/discord and internal communities are in fact really good place to look (it was not intuitive to me till recently). Often times its the other dev that is posting info, there is possibility for some casual interaction "what you workin on?". It is way cheaper for the company to hire also (cutting all job posts, agencies etc).
PG has a really old (2004) blog about how python programmers are smarter than other programmers. Basically it comes down to the python programmers being ahead of the curve by learning a less popular language (at the time), and they must be using python because they believe helps build better software or whatever. Meaning they're less likely to simply be 9-5 programmers just doing it for the money, but will have opinions on language X or design pattern Y.
I would imagine the python programmers had programmed in java prior, and were able to see the downsides to java versus python, so they had the full experience of why the old tool didn't work and how the new one solves some of those pain points.
I’m only guessing, but the best path for Crystal might be to find a Ruby job (which are relatively plentiful!) and, if/when a situation arises where you need an especially high-performance microservice/component, you might be able to suggest bringing in Crystal to the team.
My experience has been that roles in less popular languages are rare but they also substantially help match up candidates and interesting opportunities. I've been interested in functional programming and Haskell since college and it's specifically helped me get roles I would not have gotten otherwise:
• I got an internship at Jane Street thanks to my Haskell and OCaml experience—I doubt I would have been considered at a similar company like Two Sigma
• I got onto a cool operations research/AI team at Target thanks to my Haskell experience—I wouldn't have considered them and they wouldn't have considered me without it
• at Target, I saw first-hand how using a non-standard language massively helped with recruiting highly skilled engineers
The market is obeying the law of supply and demand. Hardly anyone knows those languages, and there is no big player backing them, so you have to dig inside each community to know which shop is active. For elm, you can try noredink. For f# and closure there are a bunch of Fintech.
For elixir, well, if you're willing to relocate for south west France, DM me ;)
I often see people saying “DM me” or “PM me” on Hacker News but they have no contact information in their profile and HN doesn’t offer a direct messaging feature.
Is this just because people forget which platform they’re on? Is it because they don’t remember what’s in their profile? Or is there some other way to DM people that I don’t know about?
They’re quite trivial to identify; they are not “fairly” trivial to contact unless GitHub or Stack Exchange has some DM capability I’m also unaware of.
Poster’s Web site has no official contact info. Yes, I’m sure I could keep digging and find a way but I don’t consider that “fairly trivial”.
That's my bad, I was actually also pretty sure there was a "standard" way to dm on HN. But yeah, I'm probably the one you would find on LK of GH. No Twitter cause I'm a recovering addict :D
that itself is a huge turn off for many developers who don't speak French. You will face discrimination even if you speak fairly fluent level. Not to mention the insane income/corporate tax brackets.
Unless you operate directly with the French market, there is little to not reason to move there to do a startup or start a career there.
Many young French citizens have left it and they are not coming back. Brain drain is very real there.
Funny you mention F# and Clojure, as these were the only contenders for a product I am building with a partner. We went with F# and are quite happy thus far.
What's the cross platform / native story for F# (for real) ? Can you build a relatively efficient binary that just runs and does not take an hour to open a gui window ?
I've been developing F# things on linux for close to a decade now (though my last official position doing so was ~7 years ago, it's just my default hobby language that I know best).
I have zero trouble developing on linux.
Building GUI or non-GUI software works fine.
I use Rider and work on web systems, a handful of scrapers that feed some data I collect, as well as various small GUI systems.
I think F# might have _the highest number of viable ways_ to build a GUI application if that's what you're looking for.
You can go the fable (F# -> JS transpiler) route and use any of the js tools (electron, nodegui, etc). The popular one's (react, preact, svelte, etc) have type definitions that folks have already written.
F# works with most of the dotnet gui libraries just fine, though I don't know for sure the story about winui, but from people I know working on production systems using it, they recommend to avoid it. So you've still got WPF, etc.
For the newer cross-plat stuff, there is Avalonia, Uno Platform, Xamarin (with the natives) or the newer version MAUI.
---
The thing here is that there aren't really limitations to almost all of the things I've listed above.
Transpilation targets work fine, as do the dotnet targets. Almost every one of these also has "Elmish" frameworks (Functional Reactive Programming state management) suited for the purpose:
I've never felt constrained building GUIs in F#, other than some of the dumpster fire that was Xamarin.Forms and the Xamarin build tools (native targets never gave me any problems that I can remember).
I took a partial Fabulous 1.0 (Xamarin Forms) application that I had only worked a couple days on, and out of anger with Xamarin build tools lifted and shifted to a react-native application. Almost my entire elmish (view-logic layer) was preserved, and I just had to change the view elements out from Xamarin.Forms elements to React Native elements.
---
I don't work with F# too much in an official capacity these days, but it's a decent tool to have as a default.
Our work is incredibly i/o-bound, so we would probably not see much of a performance difference no matter what language we chose. Additionally, our presentation layer is served directly from an in-memory, columnstore database and is divorced from our back-end by a batch ETL process.
To give a high-level overview of what we are doing, we call a series of APIs which can provide current-state metadata about a SaaS platform. We poll those APIs on a schedule and diff the results over time, providing to our customers a view of this change over time. So our work is to schedule these API calls, wait for the results, persist the results to storage, and then identify the deltas. Once this is done, we load into our presentation layer for customers to interact with.
We run an independent process per customer and use OS permissions to isolate these from one another, and plan to containerize these processes for further isolation. Customers each get a local ZFS dataset and a separate blob storage container. Isolation is a big deal for us, as the permissions we require to call these APIs for our customers end up being a de-facto global admin (this is a limitation of the SaaS vendor, not us). The dataset-per-customer model allows us to lose a single (and backed up, so not really single) encryption keyfile to forget everything sensitive from that customer.
This last paragraph only emphasizes that the language is not the most significant consideration for our work. We could probably orchestrate the API calls as effectively in shell pipelines. The diffing process is a bit hairier, and my current focus.
F# 6.0 added the 'task' computation expression, which is much more performant than the F# 'async' methods. It also makes interop with C# projects and libraries simpler, as is uses the same mechanism that C#'s async/await does. I have used it in production workflows without major performance issues FWIW.
I would be curious to hear more about this. My response to a sibling explains how we do not have huge performance considerations right now (and our i/o-bound nature). Due to the primary work of our product, we are utilizing async workflows extensively. We are on 6.0, and evaluating if we want to chase the 7 series release or just hop to the next LTS.
There are ample Elixir jobs out there, and lots of companies hiring.
For a quick check of relative popularity, open the past couple monthly “Who’s Hiring” here and search for “Elixir.” The community is thriving and growing.
There's a lot of niche languages for niche specialties. Like Ada/Spark for aviation/defense/safety-critical systems, Coq and Isabelle for formal verification, FORTRAN and Julia for scientific computing, Mathematica for pure/applied math, Prolog for logic programming/planning/expert systems, R for stats, MiniZinc and TLA+ for modeling, Racket for compiler work, etc.
Ideas in these fields come through clearer/more cleanly in these languages. Learning the language is easy, the field is harder, but ideas of the field are reflected in the language.
I've heard good things from guys working with Nim at Nimbus/Status; precisely because the community isn't that big they have great communication with the language maintainers and can even influence future language features/development.
But that is predicated on you finding a job first!
If you just want something "unlike JS" it should be pretty easy to figure out which languages are in demand and pick the one (or two) that most appeal to you.
If you're particularly into obscure languages, I suggest getting involved with the language community (meetups, open-source projects, etc) because for the less-popular languages the community and the employers have a lot of overlap.
I work for an established medium sized company that is always looking for Delphi Pascal programmers for a realtime directX graphics application. Not surprisingly, this skillset can be hard to find in 2022.
What is it about js you dont like? is it really about the language?
a lot of the complaints i hear about js have more to do with “the community”, “the team”, “the application”.
here’s the thing: there is _so much_ built in js. i think theres a better chance you find what you want in a mainstream language (js or otherwise), but you first have to identify what your values are.
The biggest detractor of JavaScript isn't so much about its language’s:
- lack of strong typing (unlike Ada),
- lack of a standard framework (VueJS, NodeJS, Angular, React, Ember, Mithril, Aurelia, Backbone, Polymer)
- lack of consistent control of packaging (embedded or HTTP[S]),
- lack of consistent naming convention (wild west of competing function names, unlike libc library to name one language),
- lack of unit testing (JS? nah),
- lack of correctness for thread procedure theorem (unlike Nim, Ada),
- lack of memory access security (unlike Rust),
- lack of JMP/goto at lower intermediate representation (LIR) level (unlike many programming languages) thus making direct LLVM more difficult and the least portable.
- lack of robust error handling (unlike many)
JavaScript is a runaway language with not much forethoughts being put into server-side security that continues to must have
- a wider access to local filesystems,
- a large, shareable memory block capability set that allows for JIT switching between executable and writing, heap-spraying for kernel addresses, SPECTRE-like capabilitiies (that will continue to be fileless malwares’ favorite haunting ground for decades to come).
JS did however introduce a “stack-less” just-in-time compiler that is small enough to get embedded into so many things (my pet peeve is JS of LG smart-TV that is still borked to this day) that no one single anti-virus company can ever hope to cover all those bases.
But it’s common, and wide-spread, thus got its adoption rate going for it (much like BASIC variants did during multiple decades) but it sure ain’t going to be healthy.
Of course, just flapping off my mouth here toward the incoming tsunami of flotsam against my hardcore cybersecurity values.
I don't get most of your complains related with embedded capability or security as you've said. I'm not undermining the importance of security, but javascript is not the good language to use when you have good security in mind / to be embedded. It's like using PHP for machine learning. Sure it can works but you'll find that the language is bad (or at least is not the best if compared to some language) at it.
Certainly the vast adaptation of it is an issue (like electron), but it's more on the companies side than the language itself. Hopefully there will be other javascript or typescript engine that's more suitable for backend / embedded.
I was looking for Elixir jobs a few months ago. For me the number of opportunities was good enough, since the nature of the jobs was also more unique and interesting to me. Obviously nowhere near what you see with Java/JS/etc, but with those you also have to do a lot of work to figure out if the job would even be interesting to you, making the job search more stressful.
I didn't need to do hundreds of interviews (like I've seen others do) and instead just picked between a few cool companies. It was quick and easy and I found a place that I so far love.
This question is dear to my heart, having been a pre-popularity adopter of a few language ecosystems that did and didn't become popular (including C++, Java, and Scheme/Racket).
You can search job listings on LinkedIn, Angel.co, etc.
But if it's only a small number of search hits, also consider the possibility that even some of those might not be genuine opportunities, so you have to look at each one. Examples of why:
* A hiring manager/lead is an enthusiast of the fringe tech., and the kinds of people it attracts, but not actually using it. Or not an enthusiast, but has heard it's a way to get the attention of some of the best developers. (I have done this, and been clear about it.)
* Startup (maybe more likely to choose fringe tech because the tech cofounder happens to know/like it) that is trying to look like they're doing well enough to be in a position to hire, when they're not yet.
* Recruiters trying to keep the funnel full, so candidates ready as soon as openings available.
* Mandated postings, when the org already knows it wants to hire or promote a particular person, so that person's resume gets turned into an overly-specific job post.
* (I've not confirmed this one in the wild, but it's similar to other growth hacking, and you could see how it might appeal in a market heavy with resume-driven development.) Promoting some tool or platform by faking job posts for it.
Note that this doesn't mean the fringe platform is without merit, and sometimes the merit is self-defeating. The norm in one fringe ecosystem I was involved with, on the rare occasion an established company used it, was for one super-productive person to quietly do a team's worth of work, and... the org never really needed to hire more. (And if that established company got refocused on faster growth, then an MBA is probably going to think they need to switch to a more popular platform, so that they can hire a large number of people "who can hit the ground running", fast.)
Maybe also relevant: consider the risks of investing career in a fringe ecosystem, which was the topic of my first Ask HN post (from an engineering lead ethical perspective): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23655604
The Elixir job market is getting better in the US as well. I’m currently employed at a company that uses Eixir exclusively for backend, and we’ve got 100+ engineers. I’ve had multiple recruiters from other Elixir-using companies reach out to me on LinkedIn as well.
But there are jobs, and people work in them. I, for instance, use Elixir in my day job, and so do 100+ other engineers at my company alone. I’ve also been approached by recruiters on LinkedIn for other Elixir jobs. So yes, there is a significant amount of jobs in Elixir
I program backend Java Spring CRUD stuff. I love learning (and building) niche languages in my own time but I would always be suspicious of using these in real production. Need a really compelling case not to use something boring that just works when your job is on the line.
Lots of great discussion around supply vs. demand.
As an Elixir dev, I will add that it being a niche language is also beneficial from a cultural standpoint. I want to work at a place where devs are encouraged to tinker and explore cutting-edge technologies. Not to mention a generally more forward-thinking culture, at least on the dev side.
“Established” technologies like Java make me think traditional, top-down, “butts-in-seats” kinds of companies. Of course, this can’t be generalized, but I think there is at least some correlation. Besides, using enterprise Java is, at least for me, soul-crushing in and of itself.
Elixir is at a different level than the other languages you've listed. I learned and built stuff for fun using Elixir around 6 years ago while in college, and dropped it on my resume in the pile of technologies I know around then. In the past 2 years, as my yoe hit 5 years, I now get the hoard of specialized Elixir recruiters who filter by 'elixir' and '5 yoe'. These amount to 75%+ of the people who contact me about jobs.
A lot of startups fully bought into elixir+phoenix over the years. Most of these companies would have probably been better off using node or something, but they do exist.
Curious what your TC was and # of employees. Were they all startups or were there any established companies hiring Elixir/Phoenix ?
The technology is very interesting but I find that it has the same issues as clojure: limited talent pool, questionable cost/productivity gains.
LiveWire is very interesting but its now emulated to a large degree in other more popular languages enough that I could put off learning Phoenix and opt for a more modular solution with popular languages.
I've never taken any of the offers and have never used Elixir in a professional context. Most of these are small startups and can range from 100-200k + equity, and the only decision behind using elixir was probably the novelty, not beam or the success stories behind discord and whatsapp suggesting its utility for at scale throughput
As others have said very small, especially for someone not an expert in those languages.
It should be done more for interest and generally broadening your skills to make you a better developer.
If you want to learn a new language to get a different kind of job start by considering what kind of job you want and then learn the most used languages in that bracket.
Like c/c++ for game dev jobs, Objective C/Swift for iPhone development, java/kotlin for android and so on. For more generic dev jobs the answer would be that Java or C# would be a good place to start.
There are definitely positions out there, but they're not always obvious. I picked up an new embedded/backend job at the beginning of the year and they mentioned "Oh, we're doing a lot of new development in Elixir, you cool with that?" towards the end of the interviewing process. Wasn't ever in the job description before I was hired...
And yes, most of the new development has been in Elixir, when it makes sense. :)
yeah... tbh it's looking like a bodge on my part :(
It's scraped data from four UK jobs boards, de-duped where possible but as above it's rough.
Having just searched the jobs boards manually, I can see "nim" comes back with "National Intelligence Model (NIM)", so for sure that will be a false positive.
The jobs where niche language are used (not necessarily exclusively) seem to me more interesting but might bring other downsides like very small teams. Also if you used such languages previously, chances are the next place you start turns out to also use a niche language somewhere or be open to it. The most uncommon tech is usually not even listed in the job ad and will only be seen a few months into the job...
I think you just found someone's bad code, because first of all, an efficient CSV parser would not use `split` with `if` because then the program will have to split the whole string and store all split'd string in a sequence temporarily, but second of all, Nim has method call syntax (so-called UFCS in some other languages) - https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html#procedures-method-call..., so the code you wrote can just be
if my_string.split(@[','])
or even (because we only split by 1 char, we don't need a sequence):
if my_string.split(',')
That said, you didn't paste the whole string of code as this expression is non-sensical - Nim doesn't have the same "truthiness" as Python, so if you wanted to check if there's at least two strings as a result of a split, you'd write it as
I'll echo much of what others have said, once you become a decent software engineer, the language shouldn't be a deal-breaker. Deal-breaker
It does make onboarding much easier though, for example, if I join a shop that uses NodeJS I'm not going to have to ask for help getting set up. If I join a C++ shop...
Does language really matter? Any experienced programmers should be able to pick up any language in a matter of days if he knows the underlying concepts. Similarly, the language is not what makes a job interesting.
I mean, what don't you like about JS? Is it the syntax or is it the environment? The code base? The framework? Maybe web dev is not for you? Maybe you are asked to do thing you personally disagree with (ex: ads). Language rarely was the main thing that defined the project, though there are correlations: if you are doing JS, you are probably doing web dev, with a higher chance of front-end work. But chances are that a NodeJS back-end and one written in, say, Elixir, won't feel much different after the honeymoon is passed.
If you want something different to JS, why not try good old C instead of niche languages? It has a significant job market, you will learn about memory management, and get your foot into embedded, high performance, and system programming, far from the world of JS. These skills will translate into the other (niche or not) languages you may use next. Even in high level languages, having an idea of how that works on a lower level is a good thing.
I think "any experienced programmers should be able to pick up a language in a few days" is true for a lot of surface level things, but expertise is entirely different. A language isn't just the syntax and runtine, but the idioms, patterns, package ecosystem, and tooling that surround it, which you will likely not learn in a few days.
> But chances are that a NodeJS back-end and one written in, say, Elixir, won't feel much different after the honeymoon is passed.
This is very, very far from my experience, having worked extensively with both of these particular examples.
At my current job I deep dive into a lot of years old, kinda sketchy Elixir code, and it's almost always less effort to learn/fix something than I've found in other languages, especially other dynamic languages. Except when macros are overused.
Thinking like this is how you get factory objects in JavaScript or Elixir processes as objects. They are very different technologies that need to be written differently at the core.
Yes, but the problem is non-technical recruiters. They want to be looking for a "Java programmer" or an "Elixir programmer". If you tell them that a good programmer is a good programmer in any language, and that they need to look at what the person has actually achieved, they won't be interested. Keyword-matching on Linkedin is a lot easier.
language matters in what language i prefer and enjoy working with. sure i could pick up a job in any language out there. but why would i want to? working with niche languages has the advantage of a smaller community where developers are generally more enthusiastic about their language and more skilled programmers too.
personally i enjoy working with plain javascript. but i also liked coffeescript and i ended up choosing that for our codebase because job applicants were of higher quality (including those that had never used coffeescript before)
Best strategy for becoming a high paying/good software engineer would be to think of yourselves as problem solver and language as just one of the tool for problem solving.
Thinking of yourselves as someone who is a writer of a certain programming language is self constarining and missing the point.
I used to think this way and wound up completely exhausted in my career. Coming from web dev, I used to volunteer to dive into a Objective C repo to fix some random bug in a mobile app and then a week later my boss would ask me to build a big feature in that app. I'd spend a few weeks getting up to speed on the language and build the feature, and then I would never use what I learned again. My boss would ask me to dive into another tool I don't really know and the cycle would repeat ad nauseum. In hindsight, I've wasted so much time digging into tools that I've never used again.
I definitely learned some good lessons and recognized some patterns along the way, but I think the "just pick it up and learn it" attitude contributes to poor code quality in a commercial context since jobs usually time-box things. I'm a fan of picking something up that I can get expert feedback from, which there again, requires expertise.
There are organizations that generate forgotten apps that are basically used but unmaintained. These are tarpits for developers. You don't want to be the person they fling at every forgotten codebase. They tend to be sideshows - if they really brought in the money, or the users, the business would invest in them and have people who know the language.
There's value in being able to go in, fix a little problem, and make things better for your customers. But you have to balance that against becoming the guy who works on the unimportant projects. That's real bad. If there's growth potential for the forgotten app, you have to get buy-in from the business and not just sideline yourself away from the things people care about.
Often these tarpits were contractually mandated. One customer wants a particular integration, so a developer builds it, and it works for the customer and everything is fine until another customer comes along wanting a similar integration and now the original dev is gone.
I know from quite a few traditional corporations, especially banks that have very central old systems that they pay people enormous day rates to maintain.
But the question would be if one wants to be the go to guy for keeping old cobol things running.
The value of any other stuff you learn other than solving problems has half life. If you can be paid extra for Cobol stuff for a decade or two, then why not use this opportunity and get up to speed in 2-3 years after that.
If you have just a bit of bad luck, you may have a carreer with no real deep involvement with anything, not even talking about the fact that the language is just one aspect of your productivity.
Refactoring old codebases into something nice to work on is comfy though. It’s basically what I do in the startup world I just use less niche languages.
Although I’d suspect there isn’t a lot of refactoring going on in some of those code bases you describe.
I think this is a healthy and productive career path. If you can identify when a dead codebase is about to become fertile, and how to clear the debris to support new development, you can make a lot of money, have a lot of fun, gain a lot of respect, receive a lot of autonomy.
You just don't want to be the person tasked with work that's only done because some contact got signed. Identifying the difference is hard.
> Coming from web dev, I used to volunteer to dive into a Objective C repo to fix some random bug in a mobile app
The thing about this is that this isn't just a language change, this is an ecosystem change. It's one thing to go from writing Python based web apps to Ruby based ones, because web dev has a lot of concepts that will apply no matter the language. Objective C might be something you can pick up no problem, but having the learn all about mobile development and that ecosystem is a much larger task, and I could absolutely see that getting exhausting if you're hopping from web, to mobile, to desktop, to embedded, etc.
Ecosystem switching requires a lot more of a knowledge shift than just a language does, IMO.
I'd agree with that. I even think the difference between frontend JS development and backend JS development is bigger than, say, backend Java and JS development. But managers, even ones with tech backgrounds, tend to assume the language is the key skill.
A good developer should be able to master a couple of different ecosystems given enough time but expecting them to constantly jump between them is never going to lead to great results.
How do you switch languages during a job search? Are you avoiding companies with language requirements (four years Ruby)? Do you run into language/framework tests and/or homework assignments in languages you are unfamiliar with?
I've interviewed at probably 15+ companies over the last decade, and none of them had language requirements or tests. Honestly I see those things as red flags. If you can find somebody with good problem solving skills and proficiency in any language, they'll be able to pick up your language no problem.
"they'll be able to pick up your language no problem."
That still takes time. If someone is already experienced in an (complex) ecosystem, he or she will be way more effective in it, than someone who has just general skills. I guess I am a very good problem solver. But if I suddenly would have to do a C++ project with all its footguns, I am not aware of (last time I coded in C++ was in university)? I would suck in it for quite a while. This would not be effective at all, unless I would want to change my skillset to the C++ ecosystem.
I'm guessing that's not typical for most devs and most job openings. Recruiters in particular seem to assume they need to find devs experienced with particular stacks, and for companies who need to quickly re-fill roles after losing staff, a good dev with experience in the stack/ecosystem you've been working with is always going to get up to speed faster than one without that experience. I'd also say convincing hiring managers that specific libraries/ platforms/languages/tools that you've been using shouldn't be listed as "must have"'s in a JD is hard.
I'm not sure. I'd guess very few companies that hire more than 20 devs a year would have any language requirements. But I don't know what % of jobs are at companies of that size.
In my own city I'm not sure there are any such companies. But I was involved in helping out with a hiring round for Thales recently that were looking for 15 devs. They had very strong language requirements.
I prefer companies which are open about the technologies and languages I'm experienced with. That's a huge green flag, that they consider their software engineers as smart people solving hard problems while continuously learning new skills. It also means they listen to their senior technical staff, which consider that learning new bits of stacks is hardly the most complicated thing they expect you to do.
As opposed to companies which consider them as glorified factory workers, who are insufferably hard to manage and monitor.
I'm currently working with RoR, which I'd never used before, and what matters is that I know algorithms, SQL beyond ORM, how to write code which won't be a nightmare to maintain in a couple of years, etc. All those skills are the same in Rails, in Django, in C++.
Does anyone still have language requirements? I did my Google interviews in Perl and wrote mostly Java and Go there. At my current job, our codebase is all Go (expect frontend) and pretty much nobody we hire has prior Go experience.
Prior experience is almost a curse these days. I learned Go by having the Go team review every one of my CLs for a year. Now I do Go code reviews and think "that simply isn't done, I would never have been allowed to check that in", but often have a hard time supporting my arguments. (When Effective Go, Code Review Comments, and Test Comments fail me, I usually resort to snippets from the standard library. "This pattern appears 0 times in the standard library, I don't think we should use it." It's a lot of work, but I will say that a few things I thought were simply never done are actually done. And that's my standard; I hate it, but Go itself did it to implement Go, so you can too.)
Side rant: I guess the Go team stopped doing this. Read Kubernetes for the current state of Go at Google. Wow.
It's easy to trick recruiters about tech stack ("We require someone with 5 years of experience in Django". Me: "Sure, I'm qualified"... While in reality I have over 6 years of experience in RoR and I have probably used Django in one side project). The moment you pass the screening part, then it comes the part when you judge your future/potential team: do they care about good engineers or good django engineers? Usually, it's the former.
Having done the merry go round of different languages, it also feels great gaining expertise in an individual language and to utilize new (release) capabilities of that the language.
Absolutely. Conversely, it's frustrating to deal with a build and release system that's subpar compared to what you're used to working with, but I recognize some folks probably feel that way about my preferred tools. That's just where I've chosen to invest my time I guess.
I was shocked at how hellish compiling and releasing a large iOS app was compared to deploying a web service, not to mention setting up the development environment and installing dependencies.
Yep, if I never have to deal with an automated CI/CD pipeline for iOS again (especially trying to reliably run unit tests - the simulator is flaky as hell) I'll be very happy. I don't even mind the MacOS-only requirement so much (though it does suck), but Apple's tendency to constantly force breaking changes on you is just an endless source of pain (by force I mean, release to App Store not permitted unless you build with version X of Xcode, which requires version Y of MacOS which is incompatible with version just-about-anything-else or everything else you're using.)
> I've wasted so much time digging into tools that I've never used again.
Don’t think of it this way. Learning new tools is almost never a waste of time, you just don’t know when you’ll need the lessons learned next. But you will.
Maybe it's counterintuitive, but I think the "jack of all trades" role should be given to someone who's very senior, but isn't focused on career advancement.
It sounds like you got stuck learning more trivial things before you had a good foundation in something more substantial (like C or UNIX).
If it weren't for the rampant ageism in the industry, that job might be a perfect fit for someone in their 60s who has already written a few million lines of C and is happy to help less experienced people just get unblocked.
Instead it often falls to the "junior senior" because the "senior seniors" are all pushing 30 and need to work on portable skills.
(Just my observation of the industry, maybe your own case was different.)
I've found a lot more career happiness with focusing on a long-term domain (networking), long-term expertise (testing), and a stable tech stack (python, c, etc). Got pretty close to burnout chasing the latest libraries in the latest languages a few years ago but now I'm very happy making sure the product is cutting edge but the tech stack is stable.
This is what I'm trying to do as well now (move from full stack web dev to something more in the lines of what you're describing). Any tips you can remember on how to make the move?
I spent a bit of time practicing these tech stacks in my own time and fitting them into prior jobs where I could, but honestly it’s worth just getting out there and applying.
As a fellow webpack victim, the new way of bundling things in FE is esbuild and it's better in every way - faster, simpler to configure, easier to understand... and did I mention faster? my god it's so much faster.
Your point about wasting your finite life dealing with webpack still stands, but just want everyone to know that there is a ray of light in frontend.
It depends. Maybe the alternative is to get better at a tool you already know. Maybe you can be a jack of all trades, master of none, or you can go really deep into only 2-3 things. It depends a lot on your personality I think.
Your first sentence is correct. Your second sentence would be better revised to "Explain the problem and the fact that the client will be signing on for a long timeline and high level of schedule-risk. Then work at a pace which does not damage your mental health."
I can't tell you how often a huge and expensive Oracle DB app design project turned into just emailing spreadsheets instead... That would get me fired.. -Senior Developers Everwhere. :P
I have another perspective, I think code quality are pretty uniform across languages, either all of ones code quality is poor or it will be fine across all language one writes.
Most of the code quality stems from logically dividing the building blocks and making it readable. Hence it should be logically traceable and uses the basics whenever possible. This is good, readable code.
Obviously some languages demands greater knowledge (e.g. C, Haskell) to master and use appropriately but they are a minority.
I strongly disagree. It's very visible when someone is trying to write (eg) Python in C++ or vice versa, in a way that can substantially harm readability.
Yeah I agree. I know growing and learning is the job. But how much am I going to use X in the future? I did one project in PHP. Just enough to learn I don't really like working in PHP. Is a few months of PHP experience useful in later job searches?
While the basic syntax is relatively easy, knowledge of APIs (whether standard or third-party libraries), design patterns and conventions takes time (and practice) to master regardless of skill level.
Being an expert at a single general-purpose language will often make you more productive as you can focus on the business problem at hand rather than spreading yourself thin across different languages where you'll perform worse until you become an expert at them (which is unlikely for anything more than a handful of languages and even that requires working with them regularly).
Deep expertise isn't as useful day to day as we often portray. With a little elbow grease one can get to a place of being more than baseline productive in relatively short order. Depending on the language I expect a reasonably good dev to be able to be "fluent" in the range of a few weeks to a few months. And it's not like they'd be useless the entire time before that happens.
To me, that's a reasonable investment to make.
Edit: This does require a certain persona in the space of "reasonably good dev". People who have spent their entire life focusing on a single language or paradigm are a lot less likely to be able to shift gears. People who have broad exposure to different concepts are more able to say "How do I do X in Y?" and stop fighting their new language.
I've seen huge differences in productivity between people who've been working with a given stack with for years vs months.
The quality just isn't even close. Recently I outsourced a project to two groups of people. A jr dev who had 2 years of experience but all of that experience was with the tech stack, and 2 sr devs (10 yrs experience) who had < 6 months experience with the tech stack. And the jr dev (who was an inferior dev in general) blew them out of the water because of the tech stack experience.
And honestly in terms of raw talent I think the sr devs were better, but it just didn't make up for the lack of tech stack experience.
What sort of time are we talking about on these projects? If you're looking at something that has to be done in a few weeks, sure. In a normal role where I expect the person to stick around for a couple of years I'll take the person with better overall skills every day.
In your example it the answer may be “none”, but I’d be curious of the amount of tech debt that may have been introduced by the jr vs the sr’s; whether or not sr’s had better intuition.
Yes. Lately I’ve found this to be true at my job, with the whole frontend/backend distinction.
Job specialization is good. I mostly write TypeScript, and I can usually contribute the most value to the company by writing TypeScript and sticking to frontend things. Sometimes though, the fastest way to solve a problem is for me to dive into the backend, and I have no qualms with doing so.
Some people on my team treat the “other side” as totally foreign, however. This leads to willful ignorance and glaring inefficiencies. For example, someone asked my senior frontend teammate a question, and the answer could be found trivially by someone with an inkling of backend knowledge. Yet, this person threw up their hands and dragged a backender into the conversation because they couldn’t be bothered to learn a single thing about the backend in the 5 years they’ve been with the company.
Please just be a problem solver. Don’t be just a “backender”, and definitely don’t be just a “Nim developer”.
No the best strategy is to memorize leetcode problems. All the highest paying jobs (>400k) require dictionary like recall of computer science algorithm fundamentals.
Well certainly not all but that strategy, if you can pull it off, will probably get you a very high-paying job and maybe you won't have to work so hard.
But that's not at all what the OP asked for. Maybe they're already making >400K slinging JS at Facebook or Google. Lots of people do!
I think this is true, but writing code in certain languages (e.g. Java 8) drives me a bit crazy. It’s like running a race with your arms tied to your sides.
I put certain languages in a general negatives bucket along with noisy offices, stack ranking, heavy process, etc.
The latest LTS version is JDK17 (e.g. records and switch expressions) and has been for long enough to be production ready. I reckon half of the people on this forum didn't even work in software when JDK8 was released.
Yes, Kotlin/Scala would stop driving you crazy. No, I don't see nearly enough Bay Area companies deprecating Java in their favor for new services :( They are probably betting on the next LTS to come soon enough (with pattern matching and hopefully Loom).
IMO the only way in this industry (without having your own company or something like that) to high-paying gigs is to become more valuable to a company than company is to you. and that you can accomplish only through DEEP specialization
This on the surface sounds solid but I persobally think most job searches are narrow unless you are doing “career changing” moves. How many good UI/UX colleagues do you have that are good at anything else? How many compiler developers can center a div on the page? I think this “I know a lot of things” is just something we say - terms like “full stack” developer etc…
I mostly develop on a computer which isn’t connected to the internet (so no Google, Stackoverflow etc…) and I often think how miniscule fraction of “full stack” developers could perform even the most menial task in any of these “stacks” they apparently know
If you make in a month what others do in a year, you can retire after 6-8 years and never worry about having to find another job if you play your cards right.
Accounting for taxes and moderate expenses, at the end you should be sitting on close to 2m USD. That's more money than the vast majority of people make in their lifetime (after taxes). If you don't plan to live to a hundred you'll be fine even if you don't do any higher-risky investing, slowly spending it.
Expecting a 12x of median industry rate via specialization is not realistic. I'm sure such outliers exist and you possibly know both of them but this is not an actionable advice.
It's a cute theory, but the reality is most employers want you to be relatively efficient from day dot.
I work in a team with a codebase split 50/50 between C# and C++, and if you're not proficient in one of those then the chances of you getting hired, even if you're an incredible programmer, are slim.
This is a trait of an employer that I consider a red flag. If they don't understand that most programming languages are pretty similar, and can be picked up quickly by any willing person, they probably don't understand a lot of other things in regards to tech
That's not fair. The whole point of "footguns" is that they are not obvious and that the reason more experienced people don't set them off, is because they've directly experienced their results before.
Our industry went to the trouble of inventing a whole new language (Rust), which is now being championed by major industry players, because those footguns are so non-obvious. "Trusting" smart people to "just not make mistakes with pointers" was clearly the wrong choice.
If you haven't used C and C++ before, it's reasonable to think you're going to make those first-time mistakes with your code inside their codebase. That's a good argument for not hiring you and only hiring experienced C/C++ programmers.
In practice, that's exactly what those companies do.
Depends a lot on what type of software is b ing written. The people that keep beating the drums that Java = C# have not worked with the language extensively enough. So many things outside of basic languages constructs are different. Tooling is also a big hurdle to change too.
I've worked in both extensively, and there are certainly far more similarities than differences. I've put C# devs on to Java codebases and got them up to speed very quickly. But you still need to have Java pros that know all the gotchas etc. to do the code reviews.
The reality is that today's job market is not ten-years-ago market.
Employers and companies can't find enough developers to satisfy the demand.
They should provide a bit of wiggle room and train internally as well. Three months getting into a new language/framework is not that much compared with the cost of hiring.
I read this advice so much as a younger programmer, but now I am in a position to say - this doesn't work.
Sure think of yourself as multi-lingual and able to learn anything (which you probably are). But don't market yourself that way, especially if you're a contractor. People want someone who knows their tech stack and they want you to be productive yesterday.
> Best strategy for becoming a high paying/good software engineer would be to think of yourselves as problem solver and language as just one of the tool for problem solving.
I'm not sure becoming a high paying/good software engineer are necessarily relevant to the stated goals of the OP's question. There can be inherent reward in working with a set of less popular, well crafted tools. Yes you might grow faster as a professional by working with a group of industry best JS programmers, but working with a small team building in Elixir and moving fast without ever hitting a NaN can be a pretty rewarding experience.
Although true for the job, this is a bit disingenuous for getting the job market because recruiters are absolutely not thinking of you as a problem solver with language being just one of the tools.
I don't think that strategy works best. Most of people I know that get paid very good amounts are specialists in a given framework or language, like knowing the ins and outs of PHP for example.
I rather say "be a generalist on the long term and a specialist on the short term".
This is all my opinion and comes from my personal experience, though. Take it with a grain of salt.
Knowing a language is helping you read/write the code in a good quality.
Knowing the ecosystem and solutions in this language is your sellingpoint.
Take any language and tell me one can be productive in no time without knowing the ecosystem around it.
Within our team we use 5 different mainstream languages to accomplish different goals within our system.
We handle a single service, but we manage the full stack using many different languages and frameworks.
We don't have to be expert in the frameworks, we just need to be experts at what we are building. And we learn each framework to the point where we can accomplish that.
The "selling point" that we value is to be able to deliver.
This attitude is a great starting point, but take caution to curate a future for yourself that you find interesting.
Whatever work you do, you will forever be the person who has done that work. Next time something needs to change in that domain or language, you might find yourself talked about as a specialist!
The moral is to choose and pick your projects carefully. Vocalizing your experiences with your manager goes a long way for shaping your future: like “I liked working in X and I want to do that more” and “I am glad I got to try Y, but I really didn’t enjoy it.”
This feels good intuitively but is not born out by my experiences and observations. The notion that "high paying/good software engineer" are two aspects of the same outcome is wrong. To the OP, the answer is "pays beter with less demand and more risk". Example: we're struggling to find Elixir developers and thus paying a premium for good (not great) talent; we're also looking to switch to Node which will reduce our demand for Elixir devs.
Seriously, pay the premium. You'll waste the delta endlessly searching through the chaff of node developers, and then pay another cost when your node architecture needs to be de-spaghettified or your node developer decides to create another layer of tech debt by switch to using next.js from redux, or starting to use aws lambdas, etc. Etc etc.
Agreed, there are definitely some langs that go out of their way to be overly complex, obscured, obtuse, and proprietary in nature that I totally avoid.
They can lead to what I call "rabbit hole" jobs, which make it very hard to change disciplines thereafter.
Now most recruiters, and even hiring managers, rarely have an idea of the nuances of development during the interviews I attend... Because usually their a buddy of executives within the company more often than being there for their capabilities or educational background. When the technical component comes, I also often get paired by another dev within the company, or a person with a technical grasp that's totally outside of what they know, so keeping my knowledge diverse, and being able to adapt to what I don't know is key in order to be worth a good salary.
Adapt and improvise, manage their expectations of you, but most importantly, know how problems get solved correctly. The tools used don't matter if the house built is well done.
Good luck with listing "problem solver" as a skill in your resume. I don't think anybody will care about it.
As an experiment, one can create two resumes with different identities where the first one is listing Nim as a skill and the other one is listing Java and Spring as skills, and apply to the same jobs. I wonder what the ratio of replies will be.
Precisely. Any good company won't care what programming language you are specifically proficient in. They care about how proficient you are in learning new things.
I have created a lot of Nim projects and implemented much of its stdlib. My full-time job isn't using Nim, but the experience I gained through my work in Nim has helped my career significantly.
The keyword here is good. Even then, this isn’t largely true. It is quite hard to convince companies to hire for a skill that you already don’t have experience in. In most cases, there are gatekeepers - those lovely recruiters who don’t know the difference between a computer and a washing machine.
if you're optimising for those then you might as well learn whatever's most in-demand and popular, probably Python. There are plenty of companies that are good enough though, for most you won't even need to talk to a recruiter.
> Best strategy for becoming a high paying/good software engineer would be to think of yourselves as problem solver and language as just one of the tool for problem solving.
Some languages contort and constrain your thinking in bad or silly ways.
> Thinking of yourselves as someone who is a writer of a certain programming language is self constarining and missing the point.
I find this view tends to lead to only using popular languages anyway because you don't seek out any specific language, so the effect of this belief itself is self-constraining.
yeah disagree - as a high-skill consultant coming in as a problem solver, I mostly got dirty jobs that no one wanted to touch. "Pay someone to do it!" you can hear the cries. The interesting and low-touch projects got grabbed quickly by insiders. Super-problem-solver was not a good strategy in practice. This profession has a long way to go in some respects.
This is very true but there's still is a very big difference between knowing languages like JS, Python, Ruby or Go but then jumping into a place that uses Elixir or a niche language that's different than a lot of other popular languages.
For example I took a position to do mostly infrastructure work. Most of their services are written in PHP which I haven't used since the early 2000s. I wouldn't classify myself as a PHP developer. Sometimes I find myself diving into the code to self-solve issues I have that are infrastructure related. My thought process is if I can solve a problem and it's within my scope of things to do I'd much rather just do it than add extra work to another developer on the team. In the worst case scenario someone with actual PHP experience who does the code review will offer suggestions to make the code better.
I don't really know PHP but I can look around and navigate the code without issues. There's nothing that looks too foreign and the code is easy to grep to find stuff. It's also not too bad to trace code in a large app and understand the logic. There's also a massive amount of Google results for almost any problem you can think of. It really means for a lot of cases you can combine previous experience and be productive in a similar language without really knowing it. Enough to contribute real code that gets shipped to production.
I ended up doing this yesterday where I added an IP whitelist address exempt config option to one of our apps. I wanted to at least toy with the idea of doing IP range detection within a CIDR block.
In Python this is really easy, the standard library has functions to do this with 1 line of code. Ruby's implementation is even easier and built into the language. For PHP I had to Google around but found a pretty small custom function to use in less than 2 minutes. For Elixir? Well you have to use a 4 year old+ third party dependency or dive down into Erlang and understand pattern matching and write a bunch of code to manually do the comparisons. Maybe there's a good Elixir solution but it wasn't on the first 3 pages of Google when searching for similar terms as I did for Python, Ruby and PHP. Weirdly enough if you search for "elixir check if ip address is in cidr block range" most of the top results are StackOverflow posts for other languages. There's no contest in comparing the amount of effort it took to get a solution.
I know this is 1 just example but I also know when I tried learning Elixir (and did end up writing about 10k lines of code of it) I kept running into situations that took half a day or longer to figure out while actively trying hard to learn and use the language. These problem could be fully solved in a production ready way in 5-10 minutes with Python or Ruby (and I guess PHP too) either by knowing how to solve it in an imperative way or finding nearly a perfect solution when Googling that's digestible enough to where you can fully understand it and apply it back to your problem.
> For Elixir? Well you have to use a 4 year old+ third party dependency
Can we please stop using “4 year old+” as a generally applicable rule to reject libraries?
I know “4 year old” seems like forever ago in Ruby or Node (I can’t talk about Python or PHP), but other ecosystems such as Go and Elixir take compatibility seriously and “4 year old” libraries most often just mean they are done: they work for their intended purposes and there are no breaking changes in the language or tooling forcing frivolous updates.
I have used 8 year old Erlang libraries in the past with no issues whatsoever.
Nope, I only looked up the Elixir solution for the sake of my reply here. I haven't worked with Elixir in like 9 months.
Based on the docs it says IP.Subnet.is_in only supports IPv4. The Python and Ruby solutions transparently support both. That kind of sums up my Elixir experience (ie. something might partially exist but to really use it will require a lot of extra work). It's also impressive at how infrequently the Elixir docs come up in Google searches. It's strange considering how many words are there and it's the official source of information for the language.
IP.subnet.is_in is a guard, so there are different constraints. You could still use the `in` keyword.
Honestly my experience with python has been "the solution you're looking for probably exists, but using it will require a lot of effort, and heaven help you if you need to debug someone else's code", but I have mostly dealt with Django which is a nightmare of hidden code and tensorflow. Maybe it's just I've worked with shitty python devs and on the other project Google's notoriously bad engineering practices in some of their public facing OS projects (angular, tf)
> IP.subnet.is_in is a guard, so there are different constraints. You could still use the `in` keyword.
Does that mean you can do something to make it transparently support IPv4 and IPv6 even though the docs mentions it only supports IPv4? Will it be more than 1 line of code?
> Honestly my experience with python has been "the solution you're looking for probably exists, but using it will require a lot of effort..."
I found it to be the opposite approach. The last time I wanted to increment a counter outside of a nested loop in Elixir it sprawled into a multi-week conversation with the author of Elixir, a git repo with 100+ programming language examples to solve the same problem[0] and a proposal on potentially altering Elixir itself to make this process a bit easier. The Python solution was about 2 minutes typing into my code editor and moving on with life.
I'm not saying either language is better than the other but there's certain things that can done a lot easier in Python and on the flip side I'm sure there's things you can do a lot easier in Elixir.
I found in practice for me personally when building typical web apps I kept running into roadblocks left and right with Elixir where as I never had these issues with Python or Ruby. That's why I stopped using Elixir.
> I have mostly dealt with Django which is a nightmare of hidden code
I think that'll happen with any big framework, especially if you haven't contributed a ton of code to it. The Rails code base can be intimidating too and Phoenix's code isn't any more approachable to someone who isn't already at the high end of expert with the language.
I mean to be quite honest I remember this problem and all I could think of was "this being hard is a sign that the data structure is poorly designed. But I also remember giving you a four line code sample using the process dictionary that you could have used, because this was "clearly an exceptionally pathologic data structure".
Oh yeah I remember your reply (not word for word but the approach of using it). If you search around for using process dictionary it seems to go against the grain of Elixir since it introduces mutable state which is fundamentally against what the language provides. It did lead to much easier to understand code because it brings the language more in line with how other languages work where you can update a variable outside of a specific scope. Maybe it's a good example of the idea of "sharp knives" but applied to Elixir instead of Ruby.
I don't think the data structure was that crazy or rare. It boiled down to looping over 2 lists and wanting to keep an independent count of each one.
tl:dr What do I do if I just want a job that I enjoy and do not care much about the money?
I do not need a high paying job for various reasons, but I still want(/need?) to do something fulfilling and wouldn't mind getting paid for it.
I like research. I have been doing academic research for the past few years, so I am still considering a PhD. I definitely do not have to worry about a high salary there! But I also like plain old solving problems with programming, so I am considering going out and getting a job as a programmer (again).
Since I don't care much about high pay, and I do care about enjoyment and self-fulfillment, it seems that I should be picky if I am going to look for jobs. I do not find fulfillment in high compensation, though I understand that others might. I would rather do something fun, interesting, or unusual, while avoiding features I already know I dislike.
For example, I learned OOP a bit in college during my first-ever programming course (Java). It didn't stick and all I learned was that I don't like OOP. Surely this suggests I should avoid jobs/languages that require an OOP paradigm?
Like, sometimes I think I should just go back and hardcore brush up on my C programming and go get a job writing C somewhere. Or see if I can translate my academic R/Python skills somewhere. Or go learn some functional language and see if I can get a job doing that.
> Thinking of yourselves as someone who is a writer of a certain programming language is self constarining and missing the point.
I totally get where you are coming from. For example, many people do jobs they dislike or don't care about knowing that it enables activities/experiences/purchases they do like or care about. But really, does this not fully depend on what each person subjectively thinks "the point" is?
The point for me is that I would like to enjoy all of my life, not hate my work time and only enjoy my leisure time.
Clojure's job market is great, there's no shortage of offers, even for newcomers and it has been the top paying lang in stackoverflow surveys for years https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-salary-salary-...
However, the most important part is that Clojure is a very powerful piece of technology that made me reevaluate what software engineering really is. You can efficiently use Clojure for both backend and frontend with easy access to libraries from JVM and npm so you will never run into the problem, common in other niche langs, of too few libraries. Nevertheless, Clojure's own ecosystem is filled with many great, cutting-edge ideas that you wouldn't find working so well elsewhere. The community is very welcoming, growing and diverse with people coming from all different programming backgrounds - all sharing the disillusionment with other programming languages and determination to find and build a better way.
https://jobs-blog.braveclojure.com/2022/03/24/long-term-cloj...