Clojurians Log v2

We could learn from them 🙂 there are good initiatives like sciclj that expand clj in AI/ML field.

Usual suspects always are lack of marketing/PR, Clojure hiring issues, economic downturns. The tech is awesome. Happy to see that the decadent Europe is doing better. BTW, we are doing ML/AI with Clojure. RAG on top of https://docs.langchain4j.dev/, Deep Learning on top of https://djl.ai/ Python interop with https://github.com/clj-python/libpython-clj, etc.

stability in everything ) Clojure lacked good PR. Now a lot is being done for this, but the results of this may not be soon.

I think that it's a global trend, not just for Clojure, but for IT in general. And since there have always been fewer jobs in Clojure than in more mainstream languages, it probably gives that impression.

I had a recent job hunt (I am about a month into my new job), and when looking it was hard because I also had a general sense that there wasn't much there, and the general state of the job market beyond clojure jobs also doesn't look good. But it only took me about half as long to find a new job this time as it did around 2017 so 🤷.

Personally, in the last six months, I've been invited to interview at eight companies.

My personal feeling that things are shitty in the US market (and it's not just Clojure), European stage seems to be in a much better state... on the other hand, maybe it's just... you know how the saying goes? "The grass looks greener... if you paint it :)"

For the US market imo, it's trending away from clojure atm. If I check on the career pages of clojure companies I interviewed in the past, they are now migrating from clojure to something more mainstream. There is a general sense of clojure "regret" from the management at previous clojure shops. This lowers the pool of clojure jobs at established places. This leaves startups for the rest, those hiring right now are mostly in the AI space, which clojure isn't the primary choice. The irony is that clojure is that it's such a developer efficient language that any well managed clojure startups that do exist probably don't need to hire that much, if at all. They can cruise along in stealth mode with a small team of devs.

Oh well, don't let me unleash my inner Schopenhauer, but after some years of practicing any craft, one cannot help but notice how every man-made trade has some cyclicity of bullshit hype - can you believe that bloodletting and lobotomies were a standard practice at some point in medicine? In our industry as well, some stupid shit keeps popping up, while pragmatic avenues keep voted down. I do remember times when XML, SOAP and UML got treated like the best inventions since sliced bread. Then Flash/Flex, PHP, later NoSQL, Mongo, Angular; these days is all about yaml; and now we're going through "everything gotta be AI" phase. Pragmatists often face an uphill battle against social dynamics that favor different values. That's always been the case, not just for our industry in general. Social signaling trumps pragmatism - corporate technology choices function as tribal markers rather than following rational decisions. What I like about Clojure, that many people in this community have found the "goldilocks zone", where they can balance mainstream employability with technical excellence. How do they do that? They try to master the fundamentals beneath the trends - they understand data structures, algorithms, networks, and operating systems - things that don't go out of fashion. They understand history - they know that most of these "brilliant new" ideas are simply recycled old ones. They are thoughtful skeptics, most and foremost about their own skills and expertise. They value simplicity above everything else. One thing that they rarely do is that they don't promote these ideas more. They often forget "the beginner's journey", and can't break through the "communication disconnect". It's hard to explain the "what" and "how" without effectively conveying the "why", especially when the other side is not interested in hearing the "why". Look what Rust's investment in documentation and Go's focus on tooling did for them? Clojure's best card is Rich Hickey, but him alone, making simple-made-easies every few years maybe is not enough.

I saw a graph that showed that tech job listings are about 1/10th what they were in 2019-2020 ... A little reminiscent of the dot com boom/bust. On the bright side you can use your amazing knowledge to make very ambitious stuff in the meantime.

@v1nc3ntpull1ng if we are talking about Indeed stats that's circulating everywhere, it's not the 1/10th even compared to the peak in 2022 https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineer-jobs-five-year-low/ And it's depends on a country.