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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)?

#121

Post by ld_bic »

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 write COBOL I work 24hrs/week I make $15k/week

I also can’t center a div on a web page or do much of anything other then what I do.

Specialization IMO is key to highest job satisfaction and highest salary in this industry

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

#122

Post by bowsamic »

mattyb678 wrote: post #116
throwaway1777 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

#123

Post by greatpostman »

ld_bic wrote: post #121
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 write COBOL I work 24hrs/week I make $15k/week I also can’t center a div on a web page or do much of anything other then what I do. Specialization IMO is key to highest job satisfaction and highest salary in this industry

Interesting, always thought high paying cobol jobs were a myth

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

#124

Post by listenallyall »

pharmakom wrote: post #32
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 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.

> Java 8 drives me a bit crazy

(whisper voice) kotlin

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

#125

Post by unnouinceput »

sys_64738 wrote: post #68
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…

> My boss would ask me to dive into another tool I don't really know and the cycle would repeat ad nauseum. There is power in saying No.

There is power in saying "Yes, for this price" too. Explain the problem and the damage to your mental health if you do that, hence the price.

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

#126

Post by eckza »

I just got my first job as a full-time Elm (and Haskell) developer a few months ago... and it's been an incredible experience.

Those of us who love this language and want to see it succeed are highly invested in creating more Elm jobs.

Jobs pop up in the #jobs channel pretty often in the Elm Slack. I interviewed for several before finding the perfect fit.

http://elmlang.herokuapp.com/

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

#127

Post by [deleted] »

rrdharan wrote: post #87
phtrivier wrote: post #3

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?

[deleted]

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

#128

Post by jtwebman »

oneplane wrote: post #7

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…

I wouldn't call C# a young language anymore.

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

#129

Post by brundolf »

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…

Also nuances about performance, easy-to-make mistakes, historical accidents, workarounds for common issues, etc

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

#130

Post by jtwebman »

GuB-42 wrote: post #66

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:…

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.
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