Clojurians Log v2
jobs-discuss
For the managers and CTOs out there, have you had any trouble recruiting Clojure developers?
Hiring a junior dev regardless of background/skills is going to require quite an investment of time in onboarding and training.
Very true, otoh and in my experience, hiring managers mostly disregard and always underestimate the cost of incidental complexity that comes with code written following outdated practice.
We recently scaled up from 2.5 to 5.5 Clojure devs. In the past, we have hired people with zero Clojure experience and coached them, and had some success with that, but the coaching is a large investment which only pays off if that person remains with the company for a while after becoming effective with Clojure. Mostly due to this, we decided on this round of hiring to describe Clojure expertise as a strict requirement. We got a lot of applicants (including quite a few who were eager to start learning Clojure). We made 3 offers to experienced candidates and they were accepted. To answer the original question: "Did we have trouble [...]" I would say no. It was a huge investment of time and energy, but it felt very worthwhile and the result was exactly what we'd hoped for.
Last year I hired three great Clojure devs who all did great work on the team. One was new to Clojure and was learning it on his own, the rest had more experience. I’m at a new place now and will soon be looking for more devs, I hope we’re able to find some good people.
So far I had a single interview with a company using clojure/script and I kinda felt I was excluded even before the interview, I am guessing because +15 years experience is not enough if only year is cljs and that's alone. But of course I will never get any more experience if all I get offered is junior positions.
At times it has felt easy to find Clojure devs, but recently it has felt more difficult. There are a lot of jobs posted on this slack (which is good). It feels like Clojure is taking off in Europe much more than North America (my unscientific observation). A lot of developers may not want to invest in learning Clojure because they think it will always be a niche language and they maybe have static type bigots whispering in their ears that dynamic typing doesn’t scale past “hello world”. I want to find the experienced developers who are willing to learn Clojure on the job, but it feels difficult to connect with them.
Is it possible the past year has pushed people to be more conservative in their job preferences?
How recently do you feel that it became more difficult? Also how large is your org?
Do you come across many experienced devs that don't want to learn clojure?
When we’ve advertised open reqs for Clojure devs, we’ve received a lot of applications — but most are folks who’ve been doing Clojure as a hobby or are very early in their learning curve — they want to write Clojure for a living but need to be trained and mentored. And we’re too small a company to have the bandwidth to take that on, unfortunately, so finding experienced Clojure devs is hard.
I think for companies with the bandwidth to train/mentor folks from the ground up, it would be a lot easier.
Thanks Sean! Very insightful.
Would you consider hiring an experienced dev who was willing to learn Clojure? Or are there similar training/mentoring issues?
That was what we did, yes, several years ago.
Thanks!
Initially, when we thought we would hire a junior dev, we actually had a couple of seniors apply — and we turned them away because they were too senior(!). But then we realized we weren’t going to find a juniordev unless we were willing to train up from scratch and mentor them, so we closed the req, thought about it some more internally, and then decided to hire at the more senior level anyway.
I would say there are other issues with experienced devs. Has to do with unlearning practices that are second nature and learning new ways of thinking that often goes against everything you've been taught
(we’re only a twelve person company in total and we have just two Clojure devs managing 113K lines of Clojure now)
But, with the right mindset an experienced dev will still bring along all that experience
in 2019 and 2020 we got a decent amount of interest and could interview a few candidates for an opening. This year it has been slower. It could be my job req or there are more opportunities available. When I try to reach out to Java developers in my network to come learn Clojure, it seems that Clojure is not a hill they see value in climbing or worth the effort. No explicit answer, just my conclusion. I have had success with recent college grads though.
Thanks so much Jeff!