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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)?

#251

Post by roguas »

bowsamic wrote: post #122
mattyb678 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 engi…

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.

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

#252

Post by roguas »

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 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.

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

#253

Post by phtrivier »

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?

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

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

#254

Post by isbvhodnvemrwvn »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #97
Kwpolska wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

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

#255

Post by roguas »

jstx1 wrote: post #50
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Niche language means fewer companies to pick from. If I don’t like any of them, what do I care how desperate they are?

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".

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

#256

Post by roguas »

auslegung wrote: post #40

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).

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

#257

Post by lkschubert8 »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #227
lkschubert8 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it really expected to be able to learn even the syntax and runtime in "a few days". I've been using Javascript for 20 years and I'm still learning new things (though it helps that the language keeps changing)

Yeah it's probably more accurate to say "learn enough of the syntax and runtime to write/edit code in a few days".

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

#258

Post by wizofaus »

metaltyphoon wrote: post #101
whimsicalism wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a C# codebase and being unwilling to hire Java developers seems like unnecessarily constraining yourself.

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.

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

#259

Post by chmod775 »

varjag wrote: post #174
ld_bic wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The downside to this of course is the breadth of your next job search (should it come to that) suffers.

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.

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

#260

Post by JamesBarney »

jghn wrote: post #243
JamesBarney wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On the order of 4-8 weeks.

Original poster used the term fluent for someone with a few weeks to months of experience which both Sr devs had.

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