I'd be interested to know if people who have chosen to specialise in a niche language have had any difficulty finding employment or is it actually easier given sufficient demand?
It's a trade-off of course, there are fewer job openings, but Clojure isn't that niche, and everyone is aware that it is more difficult to recruit from the small pool of Clojure developers or those willing to learn. So when they find someone with seniority and experience putting Clojure into production they will court you pretty aggressively.
1. Did you learn Clojure at work or on your own?
2. Did you first ship production Clojure code at a job that already used it?
3. If not, did you/someone on your team push to first give it a try, or did you get hired as a Clojure dev by a shop that was already using it?
I’m asking because I know that I want my next job to be working with Clojure/script, but I found and learned and loved it on my own in 2018. So I’ve not yet worked on a team that uses it, and I’m wondering how hard it is to break into the Clojure scene. I’m a senior dev, been working mostly in front-end for the past decade, and not attached to staying there.
As for breaking in, I'd suggest meeting some other developers if you can, small industries have even more of a "recommend a friend" approach to hiring than the average.
If you can't, a small online presence, some open source code or blogging about some Clojure you wrote or similar will probably get you fast tracked. That's not even really necessary, you'll find that most places advertising Clojure jobs are already willing to train people and don't get a ton of applicants, so coming in already knowing the language is going to a big boost.
I do encourage you to build a network of Clojure developers though, from what I've seen for myself and others it is pretty easy to find work once you have this. It is more about choosing between opportunities than trying to find them.