And even if you have to hire devs who don't already know the language I really don't understand the difficulty in learning Lisp - few languages are simpler or easier to grok.
Some things I observed about the Clojure companies:
- Their HR seemed slower than the non-Clojure companies I was dealing with. I don't think this has anything to do with Clojure, but I am no longer working in Clojure full-time because the most credible offers took too long and I've found non-Clojure work I love.
- Outside of trading firms, I did the most whiteboard coding questions with Clojure firms compared to shops looking to hire for Python or Elixir. I like whiteboard work, so this was fine for me.
- 6 Clojure companies, 4 different conccurrent processing models and 6 different service frameworks. Neither of these is necessarily bad, but the community was much more fractured than I realized.
- Of the 6 Clojure orgs, 4 were actively hiring (had open roles) and 2 were passively hiring whenever someone materialized on IRC/Slack/Twitter. This leads me to think if you want a Clojure job, you should probably reach out to people you know inside Clojure orgs and, barring that, the HR people at these orgs directly. This isn't a Clojure-specific thing, but worth keeping in mind.
- 4 of 6 didn't seem to have dedicates DevOps, leading to them looking for candidates also familiar with deploying, monitoring, and debugging Linux hosts. I think I was given heavier weight at some orgs because of a background doing this type of work for Clojure stacks. Might be an angle worth looking into if you don't have production Clojure but you do have Linux and Java deployment/monitoring/debugging/tuning experience.