Clojurians Log v2

I feel you man, I’m from Malaysia, and over here if you say “Clojure”, people think you mispronounced “Closure”

That's why remote rocks. :)

true that 😄

Though I find most remote Clojure companies are “US” or “Euro” only Probably due to the need for timezone overlap.

I’m beginning to think this is probably my best option https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfdX_Qlsxk8&t=68s

I prefer the way @seancorfield talks about this, even though given your comments, I would be one of the people getting "negatively filtered". But I believe I rather work with people who can take heterodox ideas that are not wrapped in weasel words, and comments that don't tip-toe around their egos. In fact, I believe that companies or any kind of project where people need to work together, function better as a whole if members can voice heterodox ideas that others might find revolting, without fear of punishment. Better to be filtered before we get there.

I definitely dislike the general attitude of "just spend more time on doing clojure" since most people who have already been able to do that have been doing that for years. If you want clojure to spread more, you shouldn't just rely on people who have the same amount of time as the already joined people had. Why do you think clojure proggrammers is such homogeneous group?

That does sound good. All of my clients just want something done - they don't care about the technical aspect that much.

Interesting, so you are a Clojure freelancer?

I’m curious about handover, wouldn’t they find it difficult to find someone to maintain what you built?

TBH my dislike towards the term "freelancer" grows with each year. Or even discussion that mentions the word. :) It often implies that you're like an employee but with no fuss about hiring you and paying you more. Another common implication is that freelancers change their projects more often than they was their dishes and that they're interested in money and nothing else. I'm not sure what to call what I have. With every client I have a very friendly relationship with a common understanding that we'll work together in the foreseeable future. And I'm not there just for the money - I try to delve deeper into the applied part of it. I know a thing or two about statistics, genetics, breeding, music - not because my tasks required me to learn something but because I wanted to solve those tasks in the best possible way, and that can only be done with a bit of applied knowledge.

About handover in general - I don't think they would find any difficulty, even if we think past the fact that there are no foreseeable handovers. They're all open to 100% remote work with no time zone requirements. And it often seems that it would be much harder to find a good Python/JavaScript/C++/whatever-is-more-mainstream-than-Clojure developer than it would be to find a good Clojure developer. The world is inundated with unqualified workers, not only in programming, and the more mainstream something is the worse the ratio there is.

What you do sounds really cool, its like you’re a polymath that happens to use Clojure to solve problems!

@ashnur as a datapoint, at Ardoq, previous knowledge of Clojure is not a prerequisite. We do however expect a potential candidate to have some idea about functional programming and a willingness to learn Clojure.

In fact, I'd rather hire a great dev that doesn't know Clojure than a mediocre one that does.

Honestly, I think we're all polymaths to some extent. :) Some just haven't realized how interesting some particular area can be. I remember teaching my ex some basic calculus - how integrals and derivatives "work". And she had a completely humanitarian upbringing, albeit with a recent interest in programming. I had to iterate through quite a few ways to explain things just to find the right one, but in the end she was fascinated by the elegance of all that math and lamented all the lost time with horrible teachers.

As of myself - I have learned self-teaching. I'm autodidact in practically everything I know. Well, maybe except for swimming - I had a coach as I didn't want to drown. :)

Actually, that is true, I’ve worked in quite a few industries myself from research to tourism to logistic, and at every point I had to learn how things actually worked . Just never occurred to me make it a deliberate part of my stay there.

Do you have a set method for self-learning?

Alas, not really. But I've read quite a bit on the topic and I would definitely recommend Zettelkasten and spaced repetition. They're unrelated and do different things, so using both would make sense.

I just want to add that when hiring, I was OK with candidates not having any Clojure knowledge (but willing/excited to learn) but they would have to counter that with knowledge/expertise on some other domain: databases, front-end web development, ops… expertise in those domains travels quite well and can be a beneficial to bring from a different language.

Note that we were a small team/company and unfortunately hiring juniors is something I haven’t figured out yet.

I guess it's easier to hire inexperienced people if you're a bigger team.

Another point is that I like to hire for the long run, so if I have to spend a couple of weeks getting people up to speed in Clojure, in the long run, that time doesn't really matter.

Ah yes, I’m kinda building my own Zettelkasten using Roam!

@slipset yeah, I don't mean to hire people who have no experience at what you want to build of course, I was just speaking out against the almost general consensus I perceived for more than 7 years I was trying to learn clojure, namely, that the best thing to get into the community is to spend more time. I mean, I do not debate the obvious truth in this sentiment, only the morality of accepting it as adequate.

Two weeks come and go in the blink of an eye

Breaking into a new technology in the job world can be really tough. A lot of companies simply won't hire people who don't already know the language, except for fresh-out-of-college hires and of course those are entry-level positions so they're of no interest to folks who've been programming for several years but want to switch technology. I work for a very small company and it would be very challenging for us to take on a new developer who had to be trained up on Clojure and then mentored until they were fully up-to-speed.

When we first introduced Clojure, we were all learning it on the job of course -- but we had plenty of legacy code to keep everyone busy and they all knew that codebase (and language stack) really well, so they could ease into Clojure at their own pace and work on new code in Clojure as and when they wanted. Two devs left: one to go back to that legacy tech at another company (because they never really got comfortable in Clojure) and the other to go on to an all-Clojure shop so they didn't have to continue working on the legacy code 🙂 Now I'm the only one who knows that legacy tech, so it's my job to rewrite it all to Clojure while also working on new code (in Clojure) and we hired a dev who knew Clojure already to replace the two outgoing devs.

I’m in a very very similar situation

Legacy and shitty stack, introducing Clojure, people leaving, hiring new people, trying to rewrite the whole thing while keeping the lights on.

We hired two new developers and the business is super happy. “Things that took a year now happen in three months” is their words :)

Clojure was a secret weapon in attracting talent.

Nice @orestis, I was trying hard to don’t be dragged back to Elixir, as I like Clojure more, but the absence of Jobs makes me looking back to my old home (I worked full time with Elixir for 3 years)

Thank you for saying this. As much as I enjoy programming and contributing to OSS, it’s rare that I’m able to contribute. This is as someone who doesn’t has as many responsibilities as others (i.e. no children). Most likely there are many other people in that situation as well.

Luckily you've got a strong dev on your team who's online name claims he's always hired...