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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)?

#261

Post by JamesBarney »

fonix wrote: post #214
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…

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.

Jr introduced far less tech debt because they knew the patterns and best practices around the tech stack where as the Sr developers didn't.

So the Sr devs wrote a bunch of really funky react code and the jr dev just wrote normal looking react code.

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

#262

Post by ralmidani »

Lots of great discussion around supply vs. demand.

As an Elixir dev, I will add that it being a niche language is also beneficial from a cultural standpoint. I want to work at a place where devs are encouraged to tinker and explore cutting-edge technologies. Not to mention a generally more forward-thinking culture, at least on the dev side.

“Established” technologies like Java make me think traditional, top-down, “butts-in-seats” kinds of companies. Of course, this can’t be generalized, but I think there is at least some correlation. Besides, using enterprise Java is, at least for me, soul-crushing in and of itself.

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

#263

Post by bowsamic »

roguas wrote: post #251
bowsamic wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where did you work in Germany? I've never heard of a 100k wage. My wife is a senior design engineer and she makes 55k in Hamburg

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

#264

Post by 71a54xd »

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.

Damn, how've you managed your reputation hopping so often?

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

#265

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

czbond wrote: post #95
oneplane wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, that's right, I knew I forgot one! It's even gaining traction in ML for some reason, we've been using it in an image processing pipeline because performance and safety-wise it simply had the best results. Edit: I even forgot to list Python. Maybe I should just look up some language popularity list and use that instead.

For Rust and ML, are the tooling libraries available to any quantity in Rust that are present in Python? I was under the impression Python has such an advance runaway any other languages will be hard to catchup (eg: Go has been trying, R , etc)

> R

You may not like R (and I do totally understand that), but it's probably ahead of Python in specialised statistical (i.e. non unstructured ML) tools and packages.

Python is definitely better if you want to interact with a GPU and/or do "modern ML" (i.e. neural nets).

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

#266

Post by wbsss4412 »

yomkippur wrote: post #161
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 ;)

> relocate for south west France that itself is a huge turn off for many developers who don't speak French. You will face discrimination even if you speak fairly fluent level. Not to mention the insane income/corporate tax brackets. Unless you operate directly with the French market, there is little to not reason to move there to do a startup or start a career there. Many young French citizens have left it and they a…

> You will face discrimination even if you speak fairly fluent level.

Are you speaking from personal experience? Just curious because I am aware of this reputation but haven’t experienced it directly myself.

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

#267

Post by czbond »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #265
czbond wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Rust and ML, are the tooling libraries available to any quantity in Rust that are present in Python? I was under the impression Python has such an advance runaway any other languages will be hard to catchup (eg: Go has been trying, R , etc)

> R You may not like R (and I do totally understand that), but it's probably ahead of Python in specialised statistical (i.e. non unstructured ML) tools and packages. Python is definitely better if you want to interact with a GPU and/or do "modern ML" (i.e. neural nets).

The ugh was a personal comment. I learned programming OO style (C++) and can go as far as scripted - but R seems like a Math professor went on an acid trip and made a language.

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

#268

Post by CRConrad »

Kwpolska wrote: post #94
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…

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…

> 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 happy about.

Yup, there's a better chance that ten of those 2 zillion positions will be in Colorado. But there's also an equal chance that 25 of those 5 zillion other candidates will.

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

#269

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

czbond wrote: post #267
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> R You may not like R (and I do totally understand that), but it's probably ahead of Python in specialised statistical (i.e. non unstructured ML) tools and packages. Python is definitely better if you want to interact with a GPU and/or do "modern ML" (i.e. neural nets).

The ugh was a personal comment. I learned programming OO style (C++) and can go as far as scripted - but R seems like a Math professor went on an acid trip and made a language.

Yeah, I get it. I learned R first, so I was really irritated by all the OO/mutable state stuff in Python when I learned it.

I guess it's what you learn first that shapes your mind the most.

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

#270

Post by varjag »

chmod775 wrote: post #259
varjag wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Expecting a 12x of median industry rate via specialization is not realistic. I'm sure such outliers exist and you possibly know both of them but this is not an actionable advice.
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