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Comment by pixelperfect | Hacker News Reader

I think the Clojure job market is pretty good for senior developers but bad for junior developers. Anecdotal evidence, but I saw someone a few months ago who had an active Clojure blog, gave talks on Clojure, contributed to multiple interesting projects on GitHub, but was unable to find a job before literally running out of money and going homeless. That could just be a weird situation, but I almost never see any job listings looking for junior developers, and when I do, they tend to be in Europe/Canada rather than the U.S.

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> Anecdotal evidence, but I saw someone a few months ago who had an active Clojure blog, gave talks on Clojure, contributed to multiple interesting projects on GitHub, but was unable to find a job before literally running out of money and going homeless

That's a bit hard to believe.

Surely someone in this situation would settle with taking a job programming in a different language instead of going homeless?

It's also possible they placed unreasonable demands (I notice a lot of people looking for jobs in niche languages often ask to work 100% remotely too).

If you work in a niche language, you need to be ready to compromise in certain areas, such as having to relocate.

https://twitter.com/porkostomus/status/1151595347157737472

I agree, if this person was acting entirely rationally they probably would have switched to learning JS and found a job by now. My only point is that there aren't many opportunities for junior-level Clojure developers who don't stand out as exceptional in some way.

I am not overly familiar with Clojure, but is it possible to be expert at Clojure, and not be able to parlay that into some other JVM language job? It might be a bit depressing, but I would think that one could take a Java job in a pinch if one had one's back against the wall.

I think anyone who's an expert in any general-purpose programming language can find a way to parlay that into a job, since it's much easier for them to learn another language, but knowing Clojure doesn't help much for learning other JVM languages. My guess is an expert C++ programmer could pick up Java faster than a Clojure programmer.

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