Add in problems finding developers skilled in Elixir and Phoenix and the small available libraries.
Of course, you also have that to some degree in Rails but it is much less pronounced.
Is this actually a problem you see? I'm going on 15 years in the industry and haven't seen any issues training people up on a new language in just a couple months.
If you need an expert in some library or language to make meaningful business progress I feel like that says more about whatever tool or language you're using, and I simply don't see that with phoenix or elixir in the years I've worked with it.
I think that this is one of the reasons networking is becoming more and more important, because it lets a candidate demonstrate their generally-applicable development skills to a fellow engineer who is capable of making qualitative engineering judgements.
Some years ago the largest company using Elixir in the US, or at least on the west coast, abandoned Elixir because they couldn't find enough developers.
Yes. The adoption is poor despite the loud voices.
This issue might be partly due to the project being in a somewhat niche and conservative industry, so there are no startup vibes. However, since they started looking for someone ready to make a longer commitment than a developer who has just started their career, things have improved. But this approach also limits the pool of available developers.
It's worth noting that we also use Elixir in this project (the chief architect is quite fanboyish about it), but we have never had any new developers come in with pre-existing knowledge of Elixir.
Since the last 12-15 months, every Elixir job posted gets literal hundreds of applications. Just saying.