I think your intuition is correct - for an already niche language where the job market is already small, cutting jobs by X% is going to have a disproportionate impact on the difficulty of finding a good job match compared to a larger language

But also market for clojure jobs is so small that it's hard to say if the number of jobs is limited due to market freeze or just generally speaking this is a moment with less offers. Because even before the freeze there was months where there was very little job offers for clojure

This is clojure's time to shine. Everyone is seeking extra productivity. Clojure makes you more productive right?

I generally agree @U065JNAN8 and if I'm required to make the decision of what language to use, I will be always in favor of Clojure, but this is not the most common scenario.

@U0170HXNCNR given that Clojure is not a island isolated of the broad market, it will suffer the impact and it's what I have been watching, at least since I started my job quest. As I need to prioritize my savings and continue to pay my bills, I'm really sad to admit that I have been pushing out to other more general stacks that will allow me to stay safe, all this due to the circumstances that are out of control, but anyways, I launched this thread to ask if my conclusion is shared with others and what strategies they are thinking of. I from my side, am thinking in go back to Elixir (not a lot of jobs, but still more than Clojure at first glance, or Ruby, which seems to have a way more offers).

Yes, and in my case Ruby seems to be a sort of acceptable Lisp to work with.

I prefer JS, myself, as a poor man's Lisp. But, MatzLisp? Sure!

Having also been affected by a recent layoff and currently in search of a new job, I can say I share some of your feelings. It's been pretty hard for me to find exciting job opportunities that involve Clojure and also match my quite subjective set of criteria. I do think finding Clojure jobs was never easy in this sense, but I don't think it's getting any better as I would have hoped so. I am contemplating working with other stacks as I evaluate whether other criteria like company culture, business area, etc, might be more relevant for me right now.

Good idea not worrying so much about finding a specific language. I got my first commercial job because of my Apple Integer Basic. They used Basic+2 from DEC. After a month they put me on a failing GOTO-ridden COBOL project, another language they used. After a month at their invitation I suggested a rewrite. I applied a structured meta approach, coding COBOL as if it were Basic. PERFORM ... VARYING ... UNTIL. Delivered in six weeks, had a ball.

I suspect that Clojure being associated with higher pay has damaged a lot its market. Some of our clients (we are a Clojure shop) are afraid of this.

Not directly relevant but on @U014V99QYA1's point ^^ I wonder if the higher pay average in Clojure is due to most Clojure dev's coming to the language from lots of experience in other langs (i.e. I surmise [no evidence] that there's a higher proportion of experienced developers in the Clojure community than for other langs)? And conversely, that higher pay depresses the uptake of Clojure in companies? P.S. all this is related to my recent musings on Clojure adoption https://www.devcycle.co.uk/Clojure-Adoption/

You have to account for a company firing 20 Clojure devs having a huge weight relative to the size of the Clojure community, while 2000 java devs losing their jobs could be a drop in the bucket We feel the effects harder because we're a tiny group

Which company did that?

I know of one that fired way more than 20 devs, OST (former Reify Health). I used to work there

But I heard about more one round from Circle, but I don't know how it'd impact the community because seems that they were deep into the process of swapping Clojure for other langs

Pitch's layoff also affected ~20 clojure engineers

A lot of layoffs, it will definitely hurt the community. I'm right now returning to my safe roots, Ruby