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Comment by danjac | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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