Hacker News Reader

Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, the demand for Go devs far outstrips the supply - which isn't true for things like Java or Node. Also, companies that list a zillion technologies as requirements either don't mean it, or won't be able to hire a single soul - usually the former.

View on HN

> the demand for Go devs far outstrips the supply

True, but many many Go jobs are in crypto or k8s-like nonsense. If you care about building something useful and fun then you need to easily skip >80% of jobs.

(no doubt people will comment that crypto and k8s aren't nonsense, but many people do think so: crypto has been widely discussed here already, and k8s maybe perhaps makes sense in a few scenarios, but for most it's just an overcomplicated mess; I've never seen it be employed even remotely smoothly).

Anyhow, I think I'll do something other than Go because of this.

The problem is that it's hard to hire developers of less-used languages without the experience. I'd like to try working in an Elixir shop - I've done some side projects in the language and I like it - but it would be impossible to find an Elixir job without the requisite 3 years' minimum, and switching to Elixir professionally to get that experience would essentially mean an enforced demotion back to junior again.

It's definitely possible. I applied for jobs with 3 days of Elixir experience + 30 years of dev experience. My requirement of half time was the issue, not my knowledge of Elixir, and I still got an offer from super.mx (we're hiring). I feel Elixir is particularly easy to pick up for an experienced dev.

I'm not sure about straight-up Elixir jobs, but in my experience, some bosses are cool with writing whatever small module/dashboard/script etc. in a language of my choice, so that way you could get a few Elixir projects rolling (if there's no big resistance in the team)

Generally I would avoid building something in a non-standard language at a company unless there was a compelling technical reason to use it - someone else will need to maintain it and if you're the only Elixir person on the team that's not a very good long term strategy.

Totally agree, my team has been lumped with random projects in C# and Go for this exact reason, with no technical justification for it. It's not that either is particularly difficult to learn, but the person who originally wrote them did it for their CV's benefit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com