Clojurians Log v2

@phill I would be interested in ClojureDart.

Well check out the #clojuredart channel... Lots of fun and highly informative (one of the ClojureDart innovators (Grand) wrote the O'Reilly book on Clojure)

s/can't/count I myself don't hire people so not an authority here by any metric, but FWIW my perception has always been that good devs managers in good companies don't care that much about "X years doing Y". Rather, they care about your general skills as a developer - how well you can figure things out, how good you are at communicating with colleagues and maybe clients, how meticulous you are, and so on. But showing yourself to such people in order for them to facilitate hiring you might be a challenge, given that HR stands in the way, and in general they do care about "X years doing Y" very, very much.

> How hard would it be for me to transition to doing Clojure or Elixir development? I guess the biggest shift would not be related to writing functional code, but rather to writing web apps (that are more backend oriented). iOS development can be compared with frontend development. You always assume a backend is there, and you can connect to it. > Would I have to start out as basically a Junior again or does my experience count for something? Yes, your experience does count. You know how to translate business requirements into technology. You know how to estimate, how to pace yourself, and how to learn new stuff (Apple ecosystem was always changing). For just writing the code, we now have AI coding tools.

Our industry is pretty age-ist, unfortunately, and it can be hard for senior devs to cross over into new tech and take on a more junior role because hiring companies often think you'll be bored with the "easier" work or you'll be unhappy with a pay cut. I'm nearly 64, and after 45+ years of software development, if my current job goes away I don't want to even try the job market the way it stands now.

That is really the saddest part - the industry essentially systematically removing its own immune system. People who could prevent catastrophic decisions, who know why things were built certain ways, who can distinguish between genuine innovation and repackaged mistakes from decades ago. Ours probably the only industry where experience has a negative market signal past a certain point. In law, medicine, other fields, experience compounds your value almost indefinitely. In tech, after roughly 15 years, the market starts to discount you. The entire field is too young. It hasn't developed mature mental models for valuing experience. VC backed growth models ruined it by optimizing for speed over sustainability.

I think we all have to admit - the game is genuinely harder now. Pretending otherwise leads to bad strategy. We are all playing on a tilted field, and the first step is accepting that.

I'd say: don't try to out-LeetCode a 28-year-old. Is Leetcode style interviews are still a thing these days? You won't win and you shouldn't have to. The goal is to reframe the competition entirely - you're not a more expensive junior, you're a categorically different product. The positioning has to reflect that from the first contact.

In my own experience - that first meaningful contact is very difficult. My bottleneck is not that I'm not good or keep failing tech-rounds. My problem (and I suppose not just mine) is that getting past the barriers to talk to a HM is a challenging problem. Nothing besides networking appears to work here.

And for that Clojure has better answers than most other communities. It is relatively smaller, therefore it naturally collapses the stranger-to-trusted-contact distance dramatically. Clojure attracts a certain kind of developer, and that self-selection creates a shared sensibility that makes trust easier to establish. Most importantly Clojure community has a warmer, more human texture than most tech communities. A community that creates space for that kind of engagement is one where your actual capability can surface before any formal hiring process begins. Which means by the time a hiring conversation starts, you're not a resume. You're already a person they know.

Both discouraging but also nice to hear.

What are the other ways to gain more visibility? You either build some OSS projects, or explore some very niche tech to the intricate detail and analysis almost nobody has attempted before. Which again, boils down to "content-generation". Like Arnold have said: "werk hard and advertize... and get to za chopper..." But to get "to the chopper" you first have to advertise, for which, you need to have work to advertise about. And that requires time and effort.

@rod923 when I got into Clojure it instantly made me 1.2x better at making Java apps, and the multiple got better and better over time, plus work done in Clojure leads exponentially (by a small but > 1 exponent) to more productivity in Clojure... in the manner of compound interest... So I wonder whether you find ClojureDart to more than recoup the bother of Dart and be a force multiplier for iOS apps? If so then you would not appear to be a beginner all over again, you would be a sage with a secret weapon.

Thanks everybody

+100 to what phill said ☝️

Commiserations about the layoff. I hope you land alright soon. As Sean noted, ageism is widespread, if one wants a software developer role. That said... I'm wondering aloud: Experience recognizes experience. So is there perhaps a way to work with businesses in the local community to solve their problems? One model I want to try out is: A sort of "full-systems" contract. "I'll build your server software at no upfront cost, and give you a annual maintenance contract to operate and manage it. I'll take care of everything."

This, with locally-owned brick-and-mortar businesses: places like auto ancillary manufacturers, small/medium scale process industries, independent clinics, high-end tailors etc.

From Paul Graham about young vs old:

I would like to add that, in my opinion, the book Vibe Coding by Yegge and Kim is very, very good. But I'm not bringing it up just because it's a good guide to how to apply your expertise to agentic coding: the authors believe that vibe coding adds what they call FAAFO (fast, autonomous, ambitious, fun, optionality) to software development in a way that can bring an old techie out of retirement. Because the parts of development that have always been a drag (package managers? remembering positional parameters? syntax sans semantics?), you can make the bot do. I'm trying to recover from my own layoff; my fear is that it will take longer for The Suits to recognize the folly of unsupervised YOLOing than I can remain solvent. But it's a very optimistic book and worth checking out. 🪙🪙

@darrell, can you explain more what it is? > [...] if you put 6 insecure job seekers together and ask them to be open and vulnerable, then that simple act transforms the emotional environment giving people hope, motivation, confidence, and accountability. Is it a community (Job Seach Community)? Have you created one yourself?

Yeah, it’s a free community for job seekers. When you apply, you’ll be assigned to a Job Search Council which will be 5-6 other people looking for jobs. They actually do a great job of matching you with people with similar backgrounds. There is a somewhat involved process that you work through on your own and with your JSC.

I believe you can also create your own JSC if you prefer.

might do well to mention https://www.neversearchalone.org/join-jsc in addition to the main intro page? I assume this is the link to join the program (so tho speak)?