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Comment by zuzululu | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate Elixir but the problem is the job market/talent pool is tiny compared to other existing languages.

If you buy into the Elixir stack then you now have constraint you could've avoided entirely by avoiding it.

Also for devs there seems to be no premium offered for this talent pool scarcity. With LLMs I think language-specialists are redundant in a large scheme of things. ex) at one of my current remote jobs, I shipped an entire telecom infrastructure with barely knowing Elixir and we brought on contractors to audit the code and they found no issues.

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> appreciate Elixir but the problem is the job market/talent pool is tiny compared to other existing languages.

> I shipped an entire telecom infrastructure with barely knowing Elixir and we brought on contractors to audit the code and they found no issues.

Erlang/Elixir experience is rare, because it's not widely used and the teams are small. It's not worth trying to hire for it. Hire for people who can figure it out on the go (amd are willing to give it a try).

You did it, hire other people who seem likely to be able to.

as a SWE this is not a good sign. it means the job market is slowly transitioning into temp work like economics. The value I got out of the Elixir contractors was immense since it not only proved that we can get a huge bulk of the work done without specialists and use them on demand for audit for a few months before AI this would've been not been possible.

normal market dynamics suggest scarcity demand premiums but this is not the case with software developers it seems.

Well,

a) did you pay your Elixir contractors more than you would pay a Java contractor for similar work?

but also...

b) scarcity isn't the only factor in price. Erlang/Elixir developers are scarce, but Erlang/Elixir jobs are also scarce. You need both demand and scarcity to raise prices. Also, it doesn't cost much to turn a willing, good developer into an Erlang/Elixir developer; substitute goods reduce the impact of scarcity.

also c) if you found contractors, but not employees, maybe you weren't willing to pay enough... So maybe the price is higher than you thought?

a) for sure but my point is that we didnt need them for long

b) true

c) i think we paid them $100/hr for two months which is fair

i hired a biologist (for my pharma startup) and she produced feature ideas for our internal stack and was guiding claude to write idiomatic code with feedback from my reviews with no coding experience. realistically if you want to start an elixir company today you need one consciencious senior that likes code review and any number of juniors with minimal competency and sufficient curiosity.

If you vibe coded an entire telecom infrastructure and an external audit found no issues then it sounds like you might need to find better auditors.

both contracts have over 10 years of experience with Elixir and one of them have written a widely used library. I think you are tad out of touch with the job market and with where agentic coding is right now.

Possibly, but I’m a senior software engineer that’s been writing Elixir for the last 5 years and has been experimenting with and using AI for the last 12-18 months.

Congrats on being one of the mythical developers that manages to get AI to write perfect code consistently!

there's nothing mythical about it

if you treat it like any architecture then there's all sorts of techniques and knobs to produce consistent output

Sure, but vibe coding a whole telecom platform that’s considered flawless by experts in the language is a pretty mythical feat if you ask me.

thats the beauty of BEAM

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