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Comment by sugarpile | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone here who is working with elixir professionally have a sense of what kind of mastery is needed to jump into an elixir dev role? I've used it on and off for ~4 years at this point and in a few side projects (most recent one using everything in the title, weirdly enough) but can't really tell if I'm "qualified" to look for a job in it. It's this weird loop of "I've only done something as a hobby so I'm not qualified to do it professionally" vs "If I don't use it professionally I'll never be qualified to do so".

Same goes for react.

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Smart teams hire great engineers and trust them to get good with the stack at hand. Don't get hung up on how much experience you have with a particular stack when looking for jobs.

I've hired Rails developers for Django roles and seen them get productive within weeks.

If you've used Elixir on-and-off for four years you have more experience than the majority of engineers who might be considered for an Elixir role.

> I've hired Rails developers for Django roles and seen them get productive within weeks.

What did you like about the Rails developer that you chose the person for the role? Basically, I want to know irrespective of the language, how do I show my "quality as an engineer"?

oh it's simple, you just have to invert a binary tree

If you’re looking for an Elixir dev role, we’re growing our team at HIFI and hiring junior and senior engineers in NYC (also open to remote).

We’re building a business management and financial services platform for music creators and rightsholders. Our stack is GCP, Elixir, Typescript and React Native.

Feel free to email me at the address in my profile. Would be happy to chat.

> "I've only done something as a hobby so I'm not qualified to do it professionally"

Definitely don't let this hold you back. As long as you're up front about where you are, and are willing to learn, lack of professional experience with a particular language is by no means a deal breaker.

I think for Phoenix it's quite easy to deal with unless the project requires a lot of Erlang/OTP stuff.

If it's just plain old request/response styles website (I think most of the project falls into this bucket) if you can handle other frameworks like Rails or Python, you can handle the same thing really well after some usage. Some basic knowledge of the language/MVC/Ecto would do.

Though there are a lot of React developers already using React but don't know what they are doing. Using React actually requires a good sense of the ecosystem - which set of libraries to use, which pattern to follow etc. Plus some basic concept like state/props/immutability/HOC would do.

I do find that I feel a weird kind of 'tension' as an Elixir programmer where on the one hand I think I'm pretty proficient with Phoenix and Elixir's syntax, conventions, and ecosystem, but way out of my depth when it comes to OTP, distributed systems, and so on.

It almost feels like these are two completely distinct worlds, but because they're part of the same language and community, it's difficult to feel proficient or even 'adequate' at times.

I never quite felt this way as a PHP/Ruby/JavaScript developer, as for the most part the challenge seemed to be knowing the right frameworks, new language features, or bundler/build tools to be 'good'.

In the most recent episode of Elixir Outlaws, the topic of overusing OTP/processes/Agents is discussed (https://elixiroutlaws.com/37), and it made me feel a bit better about my lack of experience in this area (and much as the podcast can be on the 'whiny' side of things, it's probably my favorite Elixir-focused one and I highly recommend it! If you're reading this: Hi Chris, Amos and Anna. being a friend of the show one day is on my bucket list :).)

I don't think deep mastery of the language is needed in order to jump into a dev role. At least form my POV, as long as you know the language well enough to be productive and are comfortable with going to the docs, that's enough.

The more important thing is if you understand how the web works. I'd much rather work with an senior Rails or Laravel dev who had just been playing with Elixir for a few weeks than someone who had studied the language deeply but had little web development experience.

Gatekeepers are annoying but you can usually side step a few qualifications as long as you can do the work.

My main issue with elixir dev jobs is, that they are usually not just "request/response", because elixir offers so much more with OTP.

At least that's what's holding me back.

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