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#off-topic
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2020-03-05
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kenj01:03:06

Today I’m learning about writing macros… in SAS 😞

hindol04:03:34

I was going through the survey results again: https://www.surveymonkey.com/results/SM-CDBF7CYT7/ It seems Clojure is being used most in the FinTech domain. This makes me curious. • Is it because a few big FinTechs (a la Nubank) skew the result? • Or, is it because Clojure has something nice to offer to FinTech? If I have to guess, I think by choosing a ratio over auto-casting to float/double for division and making truncating division more explicit with quot, it eliminates a class of errors. We don't discuss this benefit as much as we should. Also, immutability by default should be useful as well, since the cost of a bug is higher?

seancorfield04:03:36

Certainly NuBank is going to skew the results somewhat since it has hundreds of engineers doing Clojure so if they all filled out the survey...

seancorfield04:03:20

444 responses said FinTech. Given the broad spectrum of industries available to choose and 2,400 respondents, it makes sense that a few hundred NuBank respondents would skew it 🙂

seancorfield04:03:30

But, yeah, the ratio and bigint/bigdec stuff being so accessible could also be good draws for FinTech. Another thing is that FinTech tends to be both big money and leading edge combined so they are likely to lean to less mainstream tech. That's been true for decades.

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wizard 4
seancorfield04:03:07

I remained visiting some big fintech orgs in the '90s and seeing wall-to-wall NeXT cubes in a few places and a more Objective-C than you'd ever see anywhere else...

hindol05:03:11

Hmm, if it's just Nubank, that's a little sad actually. I wonder where would Clojure be if a BigTech were driving it.

dpsutton05:03:32

friend of mine works in another fintech place in SF. its not just nubank

seancorfield05:03:44

Yeah, I've been approached by a few different FinTech companies looking to hire Clojurists. It's not just NuBank, but I think they dwarf all the other teams right now.

seancorfield05:03:24

I just can't imagine working somewhere with 300-400 developers really...

seancorfield05:03:59

I mean, I worked at Adobe and it had far more developers but they were all split into silos working on different products so the individual teams didn't feel that big. Adobe had over 100 product teams I think...

sogaiu05:03:03

is it not the case that fintech has been interested in (and actually) using clojure, scala, haskell for quite some time?

didibus05:03:43

Had a dream the other, that I was at a Clojure conference, and Rich Hickey was the keynote, BUT!!! HE HAD CUT HIS HAIR! 😭

didibus05:03:58

Come to think of it, that was probably a nightmare :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:

seancorfield05:03:54

@sogaiu Yeah, that matches my experience with FinTech -- always willing to be on the (b)leading edge to get any competitive advantage they can

dominicm07:03:57

We have had a few finance clients over the years.

gklijs09:03:53

I'm currently at a Fintech, not using Clojure yet, but Kotlin is allowed, and there are already 3 people which used Clojure, and trying to recruit more. Would make several of our services a lot more simple.

borkdude09:03:54

Which company is this if I may ask?

gklijs20:03:58

Payconiq, together with Pieter

Clark Collins13:03:04

Makes me wonder if the survey results showing Clojure programmers earn the most are skewed because of this as well.

hindol15:03:13

Good catch. Yeah, now that I think of it. Clojure might be too niche to have robust statistics. A handful of companies can easy distort the results.

mauricio.szabo18:03:15

Working on a FinTech here, with Clojure, not Nubank 😄

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spasov18:03:34

The guys that have Clojure as your main source of income, are you working for a company, your own product or freelance?

Chris18:03:14

I’m using clojure, if applicable, for freelancing projects. However, these are mostly projects where I only get the requirements and can select the technologies which are right for the job

spasov18:03:21

Right, that makes sense of course. Greenfield projects. Have you had any pushback from clients before regarding the stack choice?

Chris18:03:52

No, not yet, though I did not have a lot of different clients during the course of my freelancing. And most of the projects I do are not for tech companies and generally for smaller businesses. So they are normally not familiar with technology choices.

spasov18:03:09

Ah, yes, that makes sense. Thank you for your answer!

souenzzo19:03:00

Company

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p-himik19:03:19

Both company and freelance. Have rewritten a couple of Python projects in Clojure (one was just an POC, the other was a pretty big app).

spasov19:03:10

That sounds awesome! How did the rewrite go? Was there anything you were missing from Python as a language or library?

p-himik20:03:30

It went just fine. There were a few hiccups but only because me forgetting to replace some plugs with actual implementations. In those projects - no, not really. I still have one project that I would love to rewrite in Python, but it relies on Pandas and right now I don't yet have any knowledge about the existing similar libraries in Clojure/Java. After using Python for a few years, I started to really dislike the language and its ecosystem.

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spasov18:03:48

I feel like the 1st and last ones would be a much harder sell.

Cristiano Rocha18:03:41

@mauricio.szabo Haha, last week I watched on youtube ur presentation at GURU SP talks about clojure, nice to see you here man!!!

Michael Thurmond18:03:11

I wanted to start a discussion on different types of interviews and why you prefer that certain style (and have you had success with it) ? For example, do you like to give an in-person coding challenge and see how the candidate does one the spot, or would you rather give the candidate a take home project and walk through their code and see how they articulate their decision making. Or anything else ...?

orestis19:03:43

Definitely not on the spot. Take home challenge was nice to make some people shine.

orestis19:03:42

On the spot, I prefer to ask more open questions so I can have a discussion, as that’s closer to the day to day. Have to be careful to not be biased against introverts or people who like to do their research before opening their mouth.

seancorfield19:03:58

#jobs-discuss is probably the better place for this...

seancorfield20:03:29

I use a mind map to guide an interview. It's a pinned message in #jobs-discuss -- I do not give any sort of technical test at all.

Michael Thurmond20:03:50

@U04V70XH6 I moved the discussion over to #jobs-discuss. Silly question, but how do you see the pinned message?

Cameron09:03:27

@U9V3P92CF in case you were still wondering