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#jobs-discuss
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2023-05-25
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Jack Gee17:05:52

Posted this in beginners, but thought I'd post here too: Hey Clojurians, I was wondering if anyone had any advice / steps to securing your first job in Clojure? Would be interesting to know! Thanks 😄 Also if anyone is hiring in the UK or remotely, let me know!

solf18:05:44

I found my first clojure job by randomly looking clojure jobs while traveling in Asia, and it just so happened that there was an opening in the country I was at. So the advice would be to be ready to move to another region/country. If they're looking for someone to do clojure onsite, there won't be many people competing with you. I admit this isn't particularly useful advice, it depends on where you are in your life and other factors out of your hands.

solf18:05:07

I also failed my first clojure technical interview. While I got to the answer, the feedback was that I was writing clojure code but in an imperative way, not a functional one, and they were right. I joined another company that had a strong functional programming culture instead, even though it wasn't clojure. Disregard this if you already know functional programming, but if you don't have much experience with it try building larger programs that deal with i/o and other impure things. Just doing koans and other programming puzzles didn't teach me that much in retrospective (they're fun though).

Georgiy Grigoryan19:05:11

I’ll tell you how I got my first paid Clojure job. I had been doing personal projects in Clojure for some months. I went to a Clojure meetup in NYC. I got to talking with someone about one of my projects. Then he told me about one of his projects. We got into it and hit off pretty good. Then he asked me if I can do some contracting work for him. Turned out he was a CTO at a startup. This wasn’t the first Clojure meetup I went to. And I wasn’t talking about my first personal Clojure project. So if you were to follow my playbook: work on stuff that interests you and put yourself out there.

Jack Gee19:05:47

@U7S5E44DB @U07V9T94Z these are both pretty incredible stories! Maybe I'll go to some meetups and start traveling 😄

jrotenberg02:05:03

I’ve only had one real Clojure job, but I’ve used Clojure for something at many jobs. Sometimes finding a company that’s interested in experimenting is just as important.

paul.nguyen14:05:15

My first Clojure job was actually originally hiring for a Java developer. I was an SDET that basically automated their regression testing so that manual testers would be less necessary. The actual development team itself was already using Clojure and Scala, so I picked up those languages during the free time that I had. I was going to transition to their development team, but buyouts and office politics got in the way, so my contract wasn't renewed. I used Clojure at multiple other jobs on my own for one-offs until I finally landed on a full Clojure team.

seancorfield05:05:28

I became a "Clojure developer" by introducing Clojure at work for small, low-risk things to show it was a capable and interesting option for JVM-based companies. Scripting, testing, in our case it was actually a standalone background process that scanned a database, produced XML and POSTed it to a search engine... small, self-contained, with a few hundred lines of code.