Clojurians Log v2
jobs-discuss
out of curiosity, have you guys ever seen any companies offering jobs in here sponsoring an european union visa?
I believe our company (in Netherlands) tried to hire people from outside of Europe twice, but their visa application got rejected, and from that point, I think being outside of Europe is a harder sell to fill. But we were still considering people Europe, when we were hiring. I think in Netherlands it’s common to get a Kennismigrant visa for some jobs, especially when you are applying to high profile companies like http://booking.com and ASML, or Philips. Will probably be harder to get a Clojure job as your first job. But you can switch jobs later on.
I started working here after finishing University here, so I am not the best judge of how hard is it to get sponsored though
@emmanueloga > I may be wrong but they don’t seem to be using clojure these days Declining. I am on a last few teams that still use Clojure. We are scheduled to move to TS/nodejs soon. Also, I believe there is explicit strategy to within our org at least to replace all our old Clojure services.
However I have known a few companies in Berlin that sponsor EU visa. Checkout “Pitch” and “FY!”
https://blog.iterate.no/2013/04/18/economies-of-scala/ has some stuff on hiring from a smaller talent pool
And at Ardoq we have at least one employee who we helped get a work permit in Norway (not part of the EU)
There's ofc also the famous Paul Graham essay on niche langs - http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html
Out of date but the general concept holds I think
apparently it happened once, in 2015
😛
I may be wrong but they don't seem to be using clojure these days
@emmanueloga I suspect part of it is that the EU has solid employment laws and treats all Europeans well, so hiring from anywhere within the EU is easy and hiring outside the EU brings very few benefits. In the US, by contrast, companies can hire under H1-B visas at lower wages and with fewer employment protections so capitalism means they'll sponsor visas so they can treat such hires poorly.
hey sean. It could be, tbh I know close to nothing about tech comapanies in europe, but I was curious because somehow I have the idea that a lot of companies that evangelize clojure are european
it must be because of the ones that I heard about all the time around these forums, like juxt, and metosin from the top of my head
I think it's a handful of fairly high-profile companies hiring most of the Clojurians in England and Finland respectively. I think there may be a few in Germany and Switzerland too but I get the impression it's a fairly limited number of companies.
One of the pros of using Clojure at work is that a lot of people want to join your company. The con for folks looking for jobs is that there are relatively few of them and competition is strong.
We're a tiny company but we got a lot of high quality applicants on both the occasions that we've advertised Clojure jobs in the past.
The other pro for companies using Clojure is that you can get a lot done with a very small team -- we have just two engineers managing 100k lines of code that runs 40+ web sites with millions of customers -- which also has a con for folks looking for jobs: Clojure shops don't need to grow very often.
I heard about that before I think
makes for an ... interesting ... job market for Clojure 🙂
@seancorfield thanks for sharing this insight. in the past i've been wary of promoting clojure to clients because i was worried they might find it harder to hire for but it sounds like that is not the case.
Well, there is a small pool of Clojure candidates (compared to almost anything else) but it's definitely my experience that Clojure is quite a "honeypot" when you are hiring -- and it's also self-selecting: you tend to get more enthusiasm and more qualified or more senior candidates applying.
that makes sense. do you know of any survey data which covers this kind of information, like the size of the hiring pool etc.?
would be great to be able to make an empirical case when i am suggestion clojure adoption
I suspect that data would have a lot of localized variation...
yes for sure. i guess you'd have to make a distinction as to whether the client is willing to entertain remote hires or not.
We're a 100% remote company and we got candidates from "all over" (the US, since we can only hire US resident/citizen for tax reasons etc) but they were generally concentrated in just a few parts of the US, if I recall. It's been a few years since we last had an open req.
I suspect the same may be true of Europe, based on comments I've seen in various channels here.
so it sounds if you are not from europe or us, or have a work permit from one of those areas, the prospects of finding jobs are grim unless you are some sort of clojure luminary
otoh, still a great technology to have in one's tools' belt, specially as a solo developer or in a small team
it's a difficult undertaking but another option is the make your own job: http://indiehackers.com
right that's what I was thinking
I was born and raised in Northern Ireland and moved back to mainland England aged seven. I lived and worked in the south of England until I was 37, then I emigrated to California -- on an E-2 visa, then applied for a US work permit, residency, and a five year process to become a citizen (completed in 2005). I've been a hiring manager for about 25 years at this point -- in England and in the US.
I've been a freelance consultant and a full-time employee in both England and the US.
I'm looking to start freelancing. In the past, I've tried sites like upwork, but was disappointed because it seemed like mostly people wanting help with their Wordpress sites in PHP and whatnot. And the barrier of starting out without a reputation seems daunting. Any helpful advice where I could begin?
My first one is from Toptal, and we eventually started working directly (it's completely legal, his contract with Toptal allows it under some conditions). The rest of my clients all came from a single place. At one point I came to a genetics institute in my city and asked if I could work with them. I didn't want any money, I just was interested in genetics. They agreed, but they immediately started to pay me because for them it was the right thing to do. All other clients are just people that heard about me from the people in the institute.
my experience as well, that initially I had to work for free, although I didn't mind this at the time, I don't think everyone should go through the same experience. But this also seems to vindicate the process, as in, if someone has the chance to work in this area, it usually is welcoming.
Well, I didn't have to, I wanted to. :)
I'm also pretty active in supporting an open-source project. I've received a couple of leads from there - people wanted to hire me for consulting/development.
My current plan for getting future clients, if I ever need a new one, is just like with the institute - I'd go somewhere where I would definitely like working even for free. If that doesn't work, I would try to find companies that, in my opinion, could benefit from my skills. And where I could show them that without them having to hire me. Needless to say, I haven't tried this approach, but it seems to work fine in other areas.
I used to work via Toptal (can give you a referral link if you want). Overall, my experience is positive. But nowadays I work as an independent contractor. And I would probably advise anyone to do the same, because my experience have been stellar so far.
Also, there are other platforms similar to Toptal - you should definitely search around and try to compare them.
Thanks, that's already very helpful!
How do you find work as an independent?