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Ask HN: What is the job market like for niche languages (Nim, Crystal)?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the job market like for niche languages (Nim, Crystal)?

#111

Post by kevinmchugh »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #36
blocked_again wrote: post #15

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 di…

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.

Re: Ask HN: What is the job market like for niche languages (Nim, Crystal)?

#112

Post by jghn »

Nextgrid wrote: post #42
blocked_again wrote: post #15

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.

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 perfo…

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.

Re: Ask HN: What is the job market like for niche languages (Nim, Crystal)?

#113

Post by weatherlite »

rco8786 wrote: post #51
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

> 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.

What lessons do I learn from learning webpack? Or whatever the new way of bundling things in FE is called now?

Compare that to understanding C or UNIX. There are skills that decay much slower than others.

Re: Ask HN: What is the job market like for niche languages (Nim, Crystal)?

#114

Post by girishso »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #31
jstx1 wrote: post #5

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.

It really amazes me how often I see this fallacy. 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 b…

This. This is how I choose my tech stack these days.

Re: Ask HN: What is the job market like for niche languages (Nim, Crystal)?

#115

Post by 2c2c2c »

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.

Re: Ask HN: What is the job market like for niche languages (Nim, Crystal)?

#116

Post by mattyb678 »

throwaway1777 wrote: post #102
ptttr wrote: post #43

I do definitely recommend Clojure - I've switched to it in 2019 coming from Rails and JS and never looked back. 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…

These salary numbers in the survey are so low it seems like a joke.

My guess is that the salaries of developers outside of the US, and western countries, pull down the averages

Re: Ask HN: What is the job market like for niche languages (Nim, Crystal)?

#117

Post by lawik »

japhib wrote: post #62

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.

Re: Ask HN: What is the job market like for niche languages (Nim, Crystal)?

#118

Post by rrdharan »

shocks wrote: post #110
rrdharan wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Litmus test I guess. Parent is fairly trivial to contact if you can use Google.

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”.

Re: Ask HN: What is the job market like for niche languages (Nim, Crystal)?

#119

Post by eulers_secret »

throwaway1777 wrote: post #102
ptttr wrote: post #43

I do definitely recommend Clojure - I've switched to it in 2019 coming from Rails and JS and never looked back. 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…

These salary numbers in the survey are so low it seems like a joke.

As the other poster said, it's due to other countries confounding the data. Check this for example: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-salary-salary-...

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.

Re: Ask HN: What is the job market like for niche languages (Nim, Crystal)?

#120

Post by thebigspacefuck »

ptttr wrote: post #43

I do definitely recommend Clojure - I've switched to it in 2019 coming from Rails and JS and never looked back. 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…

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.

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