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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)?

#241

Post by drstewart »

akudha wrote: post #229
bowsamic wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

These benefits in Europe are grossly inflated though

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

#243

Post by jghn »

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…

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.

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

#244

Post by bowsamic »

akudha wrote: post #229
bowsamic wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

#245

Post by bowsamic »

ecshafer wrote: post #228
bowsamic wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

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

#246

Post by bowsamic »

throwaway675309 wrote: post #215
bowsamic wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you think I’m defending the lack of compensation?

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

#247

Post by weatherlite »

EddySchauHai wrote: post #165
weatherlite wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is your role now (just curious), what do u mean by testing? And what was your prior experience before making this move?

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

#248

Post by celdon25 »

thebigspacefuck wrote: post #120
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 ab…

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.

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

#249

Post by em-bee »

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:…

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)

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

#250

Post by nickjj »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #232
nickjj wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

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