Elixir is a super fun language but suffers (at least in my opinion) from a serious lack of remote jobs. And I suspect it’s because of the nature of Elixir jobs in general: load-heavy and systems-heavy tasks for critical roles (fintech etc), which means it’s tricky to hire someone thousands of miles away to do the work.
Woah, I have the totally opposite perspective-- that if you want to hire Elixir engineers you pretty much have to hire remotely.
Most locales have such a small number of Elixir engineers available hiring remotely is the only real option... Because Elixir isn't most folks first language the hiring-pool tends to be pretty senior level engineers (even if they're new to BEAM/OTP) meaning they can kind of choose to work remotely or not.
> And I suspect it’s because of the nature of Elixir jobs in general: load-heavy and systems-heavy tasks for critical roles (fintech etc), which means it’s tricky to hire someone thousands of miles away to do the work.
I don't think that's the case myself or haven't seen that particular issue. In fact, I won't forget an Erlanger I met once who was a very large company's only remote employee. I'd say the nature of BEAM/OTP mean you need to be onsite even less because the debugging tools are so good it wouldn't give you much.
You an remotely login to a running instance of your application and fire up Observer. No magic, hacks, restarts, debug builds, or bullshit needed. Be on the network, have the erl cookie, and fire up an eshell... It's awwwwwesome.
As others have said, I just think the number of places using Elixir is still relatively low compared to other more ubiquitous languages. You really only find Elixir/Erlang in the first place because you've probably burnt yourself out dealing with `NIO` everywhere else and want something sane so you can once again know the warmth joy in your cold dead heart.
My twitter feed has some remote Elixir jobs popping up from time to time. I just saw this 10min ago: https://www.sketch.com/jobs/backend-developer/. I don't think it's more difficult to get an Elixir job than, lets say Rust one.
While the market for remote Elixir job is small I suspect that the number of Elixir engineers is fewer than, say, JS engineers so it might balance out.
We have found 2 good remote elixir devs on HN (and one off HN) and are happy so far. We are always keeping an eye our for more! Only caveat for now is that they’re US only.
