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#jobs-discuss
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2017-05-22
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norman12:05:44

When a company posts a remote clojure job they are doing to get overwhelmed with applicants, and many of them are going to have significant clojure experience. Even if the company might be perfectly happy bringing in someone newer to clojure, it’s hard to justify not taking the more experienced clojurists applying or the one with that “perfect” skill set.

Drew Verlee14:05:06

Does that imply the supply of clojure dev seeking jobs is greater then the demand? That would be ironic, given how much you FUDA you hear about finding devs outside mainstream languages.

norman14:05:49

Yes, the supply is way higher than the demand.

norman14:05:17

If a remote clojure job doesn’t pull a couple dozen resumes pretty quickly, there’s probably something wrong with the position. (pay way out of line or something)

norman14:05:49

Locally the story is different. If you can only hire locally, it’ll depend on the local community.

norman14:05:26

We have a really bad situation here in Austin, for example. We have a great Clojure community and several people actively looking for Clojure work. Those f us working here all work remotely, so we haven’t gotten much traction getting local clojure teams going.

norman14:05:08

New people to the group looking for work don’t have the experience to stand out for the remote positions and don’t have local options. We’ve lost quite a few people who moved to other cities for local jobs. Others have just given up and moved on.

norman14:05:01

This is a cycle I don’t know how to break.

fellshard15:05:11

It's an industry problem of siloing developers into language, or holding language knowledge as the premium skill.

fellshard15:05:49

When in reality, any developer who learns more than one paradigm is well on their way to being able to work in any codebase with minimal ramping time.

fellshard15:05:48

So a good chunk of the solution is to champion team-selected stacks where possible, the current main obstacle being coordination with ops teams to ensure you can deploy a given language to your existing tech stacks.

fellshard15:05:28

That's becoming a much simpler process thanks to containerization, but serverless poses the problem anew.

fellshard15:05:02

As independent contractors seeking Clojure-only work, that's a much harder sell. As someone working inside an existing company, you have more flex to make those things happen, possibly. But you need a culture that's ready to make that kind of polyglot transition.

dm316:05:40

it’s not just language knowledge - in order to successfully evolve a long-term project you have to be aware of the ecosystem, design patterns, operational concerns. This knowledge takes way more than a couple of weeks to internalize.

sveri17:05:49

I would argue that the patterns and problems are mostly the same, from an abstract point of view. Thats what code reviews and pair programming are there for. If a team is welcoming and open an experienced developer will be up to speed in a few weeks, no matter the language / ecosystem.

dm317:05:40

that’s true. However with less popular languages like Clojure the supply of experienced developers usually outweighs demand. You have to either win by having more relevant domain experience, deeper knowledge of the technical bits or lower financial demands.

fellshard17:05:58

Or seek developers that can learn any domain or system,independent of language.

dm317:05:37

yep, although that’s a much harder skill to prove during an interview 🙂

sveri17:05:59

Yea, thats my experience too. Thats why I look for Engineering / Developer jobs and just dont care about the language. I always remember when I was like 11 a teacher told us a story about actors in the medieval age. They were basically wandering around and had a fixed set of acts that they had memorized. Still they applied for different acts and just took the nights to learn them. Its not different today, one applies with a set of skills which should be much broader than a programming language. Two of the skills have to be the ability to adapt and to learn and to convince the one on the other side 😄

dm317:05:31

it’s also a completely different world depending on the company - whether you’ll be the first technical employee, the third or the 100th

fellshard17:05:23

Yep. That's more on us as developers having marketed ourselves for years as 'code-writers', not 'system-shapers'.

fellshard17:05:55

And a certain silicon valley has not been helping that impression...

dm317:05:31

to be fair, it’s usually a long path from a code writer to a system shaper that not everyone reaches, independent of the years of experience

fellshard17:05:55

Which is part of the reason I remain interested in some of the propositions of software craftsmanship, despite its supposed reputation.

jeff.terrell17:05:32

Love the discussion here y'all. 👍 @fellshard - I'm a big fan of software craftsmanship as a value, but I'm unaware that it has a negative reputation. Can you elaborate? Also, is there like a recognized set of propositions somewhere? If so, I'm unaware of that too.

fellshard17:05:48

I think most of the negative reputation stems from Uncle Bob, who's rather polarizing since he takes very adamant, all-or-nothing views on many topics, especially the primacy of TDD.

jeff.terrell17:05:31

OK, that's good to know. I'll check that out, thanks!

fellshard17:05:48

Funny enough, Uncle Bob and 8th Light have been promulgating Clojure of late as one of their favored tools.

jeff.terrell17:05:42

Yeah, I like that manifesto. I signed it.

facundo18:05:13

nice discussion. I got a bit frustrated after a couple of months of looking for clojure remote jobs and not even getting to an interview. Not only there are too few remote positions, but most of them won’t even consider people not residing in the US

facundo18:05:05

I understand there are less companies using it, and hiring someone from another country carries a lot of risks, but I found odd than it feels easier for me to get an interview for, say, an Erlang or Elixir position, for which I don’t have any experience

facundo18:05:11

I kind of get the feeling that companies using clojure are less open to remote teams than what I’ve seen in other languages

dottedmag18:05:26

And Cognitect is not open to $RANDOM_CLOJURIST

Drew Verlee18:05:48

@dottedmag what does that mean?

dottedmag18:05:03

It means Cognitect is open to remote people, but very picky.

Drew Verlee18:05:13

I get the feeling that hiring remote devs would be such a win, but by the time i’m in a position to see it happen, it won’t be anymore 😕