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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)?

#211

Post by Strom »

barankilic wrote: post #187
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.

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.

If you're an actual problem solver, you don't even need a CV. Your clients will be so happy that they will recommend your services to their buddies.

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

#212

Post by gorgoiler »

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:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1NzR9vgCIkU

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

#214

Post by fonix »

JamesBarney wrote: post #190
jghn wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 And honestly in terms of raw talent I think the sr devs were better, but…

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.

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

#215

Post by throwaway675309 »

bowsamic wrote: post #173
wiseowise wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Especially in the US salaries are extremely inflated. Funny way to spell "fairly compensated".

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.

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

#216

Post by lmarcos »

ipaddr wrote: post #134
rtlfe wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty excessive. I've switched languages whenever I get a new job, every 2-5 years. I think this is more what OP had in mind.

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?

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.

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

#217

Post by edgyquant »

kevinmchugh wrote: post #111
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…

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 mak…

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.

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

#218

Post by mistrial9 »

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.

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.

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

#219

Post by Tiberium »

egberts1 wrote: post #49
blablabla123 wrote: post #28

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...

Ive found that Nim has an interesting way of doing string handling, as if it is some kind of Polish notational aspect. Take part of a CSV parser, for example: if @[ ‘,’ ].split(my_string)

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

  if my_string.split(',').len > 1:
    # do stuff

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

#220

Post by throwawaymaths »

nickjj wrote: post #146
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.

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…

Did you try asking on the forums?

https://hexdocs.pm/net_address/IP.Subnet.html

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